by Ella Berman
I left the event flanked by my parents and Esme, and the fans waiting outside went wild for me all over again. My dad had located the car and was already opening the door when my mom grabbed my arm and leaned in close to me.
“Wait,” she said, her breath warm and slightly sour from the champagne. “Just wait a moment, Grace.”
She pointed to the crowd, and I understood what she meant. My mom wanted me to stop and take everything in, to preserve the moment and store it somewhere so that I could look back on it when I was old and no longer beautiful, and perhaps had forgotten what it felt like to be loved by people I’d never met. So I stopped, my arm still interlaced with hers, and we gazed out at the crowd together. Goose bumps traveled up my arms as I tried my hardest to absorb every tiny thing about the moment. It was the first time I could remember seeing my mother this proud of me, and now all of these strangers seemed to want to love me too. I smiled and waved at them, and their voices only got louder.
When we eventually got into the car to go home, the sound of the fans’ chanting still ringing in my ears, I finally figured out what it was they had been saying all along:
Grace Turner, Grace Turner, Grace Turner.
They shouted it so many times that it had morphed into something else entirely.
CHAPTER TWELVE
When Dylan comes back from work, Wren and I are sitting next to each other on the sofa, sharing a bottle of red wine and watching Scarface. Wren knows all the words and has been murmuring along with Al Pacino the whole way through. Dylan stands in the doorway with his hands by his sides, looking between the two of us.
“Grace? Can I speak with you in the kitchen?”
Wren’s eyes remain fixed on the TV. I wonder if she really doesn’t realize how weird this is or if she’s trying to show Dylan how cool she can be with the situation. Either way, I figure she doesn’t know what it is to hurt or be hurt yet.
Dylan leans on the island, shaking his head slowly.
“So you’re drinking again.”
“Well, I was until you came back,” I say, rolling my eyes, but he doesn’t smile and I instantly regret it.
“Half a glass of red wine, Dylan. It’s not a big deal.”
“Addiction isn’t something you can dip in and out of. It’s all a big deal. Wren shouldn’t have been drinking in front of you.”
I forgot he’d started going to the Nar-Anon family meetings before I left. Being back here, I can remember what it felt like to have the weight of his expectation crushing me every day. There are an infinite number of things that are better than knowing exactly when you’re falling short of someone’s expectations and still being unable to stop it. Toward the end I think I did it on purpose, just so we’d both have a reason to feel as bad as we did.
“Can I tell you a secret?” I climb onto one of the breakfast stools and rest my chin in my hand. My blood is already warm from the wine, and I don’t want to admit it but I already feel calmer, steadier. I study Dylan’s face, taking advantage of the fact that he can’t seem to look directly at me. He nods, his face tight as he stares down at his hands.
“I don’t know if I was ever addicted to any of it. It just seemed easier to say than admitting that I actually liked forgetting who I was for a few hours.”
“That’s still destructive,” he counters. “Using it to forget who you are.”
“I don’t know, it’s actually been one of the higher functioning relationships in my life,” I say, immediately regretting my choice of words.
“Grace,” he says, and suddenly my chest hurts.
“Fine,” I say, pushing the glass toward him. I make a mental note to hide the bottle of Percocet somewhere other than just under my pillow. Dylan was there when I was first prescribed the pills following a subtle tweak to my nose (a finessing more than anything), but he never knew how many times I’d topped up my prescription since then.
“Don’t just do it for me though,” he says, visibly relieved. Laurel used to call him Dylan the Saint, and he’s still the only person I know who never even has to try to do the right thing, it just comes naturally to him. I look over his head, at the fridge where five colorful stick drawings of Wren are pinned up with magnets. Dylan is pretending he’s already built the big, perfect family just like the one he left behind.
“Would you mind not saying anything to Wren?” I ask.
“Whatever you want, Grace,” he says, but I can see that there are a million things he wants to be saying instead of that. Eventually, he finds one of them. “Did you come back to make it official?”
Dylan looks me straight in the eye for the first time since I’ve been back, and I feel a familiar kick low in my belly.
“I don’t know,” I say again. “If you need to for Wren, then we can start—”
“Don’t put this all on me,” he interrupts, shaking his head. I know there’s nothing I can say that will fix anything. People only want to hear the truth if it also happens to be what they want to hear. There is no way of telling him that he never stood a chance with me.
“Can you just explain one thing to me? Because of all the things that went wrong, there is this one thing in particular that stands out for me—” He breaks off, and this time his hurt is drawn so acutely onto his face that I’m the one to turn away. He takes a deep breath and stares up at the industrial chandelier we chose together. “You never called. Not even once.”
“I thought it would make it worse,” I say, while he stands opposite me, looking as if I have come back solely to set his life on fire all over again.
“Are you happy, Dylan?”
“What’s that got to do with anything? Fuck.”
It’s the last thing that the Dylan I knew would have said, and we are both quiet for a moment.
“It was nothing to do with you. Why I left.” I know instantly that it was the wrong thing to say. Dylan takes a small step back as if I’ve punched him.
“Well that’s just fucking great.”
His dark hair is sticking out where he’s been running his hands through it, and he looks at me differently, as if he’s seeing me for the first time. My heart twists in my chest, and I know that he’s finally going to ask me why I left, and if he does, I know that I have to find the words to tell him.
He takes a deep breath and speaks slowly, saying instead, “You took your wedding ring off.”
I look down at my bare hands, and I know I shouldn’t be as surprised as I am. We were always living different versions of the same story.
“Where did it go? I would have taken it back. You knew it was my grandma’s.”
Where did it go?
It was my first night back in Anaheim. I was fragile, sober for the first time in months, and I felt as if I was absorbing everything around me, but instead of weighing me down, I was lighter than ever before, as if I might float away and nobody would know how to look for me. I went to bed early and I reached for the locket that Dylan had given me just after we met, but it wasn’t there. I tore through my suitcase, and when I still couldn’t find it, I hid beneath the covers of my childhood bed, my body racked with grief for the death of everything I had tried so hard to be. The next morning I woke early and gave the rest of my jewelry to the first woman I saw on the street, a cleaner for one of our neighbors. It was raining as I handed it over and I told her to give it to her kids, or grandkids, whoever she wanted. A few months later I watched as a bored cashier at CVS bagged my tampons while wearing my old wedding ring.
I look at Dylan and understand that what I say next is important. I’m about to tell him the truth, when Wren starts singing along with a commercial in the next room. Dylan is waiting, staring down at the floor with his jaw clenched, and I think about the infinite number of things I could say to let myself off the hook, the whole while knowing I would only end up hurting him again, and again and again, until neither of us recogniz
ed ourselves anymore.
I take a deep breath. “I sold it.”
Dylan breathes out heavily, and he can barely bring himself to look at me. We always did have our biggest fights in the kitchen. We were two kids pretending to be adults in an $8 million house with nothing of our own.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A story about Dylan, or maybe just a sentence. Dylan looks like Johnny Depp in Cry Baby but he says okeydokey and does a dance to make me laugh when he’s brushing his teeth. No . . . another one. When I first met him, Dylan had a framed print of David Hockney’s Pearblossom Hwy. hanging on his bedroom wall. He’d had it for years and never once noticed the trash lining the side of the road. I felt bad after I pointed it out because before me he’d only ever seen the endless blue sky and the open road leading to anywhere you wanted to go. Cut Dylan open and he will most likely bleed America and maybe some puppies.
* * *
• • •
Dylan and I circle each other warily in the house, but somehow I settle into a routine that, if not thrilling, is gently gratifying in its mundanity. I spend most of my time wandering the serene Venice canals. The houses lining the water defy all rules of architecture: a pink Tuscan villa with purple Tudor turrets stands next to a midcentury craftsman bungalow with a photovoltaic canopy on the roof. It’s the same way all over LA, as if to belabor the point that you get to choose who you want to be in this beautiful baby country. One morning, I watch a couple row a boat from the dock outside their house to their friends’ house, waving a bottle of champagne wrapped in pages from an issue of the Hollywood Reporter.
A lone paparazzo half-heartedly waits outside the glass house, but I escape through the back on foot, trailing down to the beach and then cutting back up to Abbot Kinney Boulevard or Rose Avenue. The residents of Venice have always been respectful of my privacy, but I still look at the tarmac, the sky, anywhere but the faces of the people I pass. At night we eat at home, ramen that Wren makes with thick shitake mushrooms floating on the oily surface. Wren never eats much of hers, tipping her slimy noodles down the sink once we’re finished, while I pretend not to notice.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” Wren says cheerily at the start of one of these meals, my sixth or seventh night at the house. She holds her wineglass up and I clink it lightly with my water glass.
Dylan avoids looking at either of us, staring instead into his bowl of ramen as I realize too late that this probably isn’t the Thanksgiving he had planned. He usually goes home to Ohio, and I wonder briefly why he didn’t bring Wren back this year, before figuring that he didn’t want to leave me by myself. I can only imagine that Dylan’s parents already love Wren. Even I can see that she is perfect for him; she probably greets his parents at the airport with fresh-baked cookies and bracelets made by the children of convicts. I try not to think about it anymore, or about my own family at home, eating some god-awful sodium-free bird that my dad will have incinerated beyond recognition and my mom will barely touch.
“Nathan called again. He sounded even more pissed this time and told me to remind you that you’re still very much under contract with him,” Wren recounts, once we’ve started eating again.
I swallow a mouthful of soup, trying to disguise the fact that I flinched at the mention of my agent’s name even though Dylan is never looking at me anyway. Nathan, Kit and Able. The only holy trinity allowed in my life.
“John Hamilton also called. He wanted to know if you can have lunch together tomorrow. He said you could choose where. He has a project, like this beautiful, powerful love story set in space, but, you know, with a feminist edge, that he needs to talk to you about.”
Wren takes a long gulp of wine before adding, “It sounds super original.”
“I don’t know, it could be interesting,” Dylan says, sounding anything but interested. John Hamilton directs big-budget action movies, essentially 120 self-indulgent minutes of car chases and half-naked women, so I know he can’t really be listening.
“Oh, come on. Hollywood’s version of feminism is a Victoria’s Secret model knocking men out while wearing a Lycra bodysuit. Right, Grace?” Wren rolls her eyes at me and I smile back at her. Dylan frowns and I realize two things at the exact same moment—one, that I like Wren, and two, that I could probably stay here forever, in this house where nothing is ever asked of me, but that if I do I’m going to ruin everything for Dylan, and probably myself, all over again. I put down my chopsticks and pick out a piece of spongy tofu that drips down my fingers.
“I’ve been meaning to tell you both that I’m going to move out this week,” I say, once I’ve swallowed it. “I figure it’s time to try something different.”
Wren looks to Dylan for her cue before she speaks, but the expression on his face makes her stare back down at her lap for a moment before she reassembles her features and smiles at me.
“Are you sure? I can look for somewhere . . . This setup wasn’t ever permanent, my lease just came up a couple of months ago so we thought . . .”
. . . that Dylan’s wife had left him a year ago without so much as a working phone number so it should be fine . . . I finish the sentence for her in my head and resist the urge to laugh.
“No,” I say loudly instead, and they both stare at me.
“I’ll look at some places tomorrow. Or . . . Laurel will. Venice is so over anyway, right?” I say, trying to make Dylan smile with my impersonation of her. He doesn’t, and I start clearing away our bowls instead, my obnoxious words hanging in the air like a noose.
Happy Thanksgiving.
* * *
• • •
I meet Laurel at the Butcher’s Daughter for brunch the next morning, and she doesn’t even raise an eyebrow when I order the egg sandwich with a side of potatoes. I offer her the same courtesy when she orders a glass of rosé. I’m relieved that we’re not pretending she’s my sober companion anymore, particularly after Dylan told me he saw her hounding everyone for coke at some party he’d been to in the hills just after I went away.
“Have you spoken to Nan? You’re everywhere, and not in a good way,” Laurel says as soon as her wine has arrived. Nan is—or was—my publicist. Big teeth, a lot of hair, and looks simultaneously as if she could have been a member of the royal family and like she might retire and start breeding Labradors at any given moment. She was very good at her job in an uncompromising way that I know should have impressed me more than it terrified me.
“Not since I’ve been back. I’m everywhere?”
“Honey, it was okay for you to be clueless when you had a full team around you, but now that you’re clearly desperate to do everything on your own, you have to at least let me in on your plans.”
“I don’t have a plan. You don’t always need a plan,” I say, just to cover up the fact that I only seem to remember I don’t have a plan when somebody reminds me. I feel unexpectedly angry that, along with everything else, my time isn’t even my own to waste.
“You know you’ll be starting from the beginning again if you leave it too long.”
“How are you so sure I want to act again?” I ask, frowning.
“Because you were good at it. And because you don’t know how to do anything else, unless you’ve learned the ukulele since I last saw you?”
Laurel taps something out on her phone and then passes it over for me to see. It’s a story from a gossip site I don’t think I’ve heard of before. The headline “Drugged and Alone” sits over a photo of my pale, bloated face that must have been taken as I walked through the canals the other day. I look like Charlize Theron in Monster, but I tell myself it’s just the angle. I should probably wash my hair tonight though.
“The Snap Online has posted about you being back in Venice, living with Dylan and his new girlfriend,” Laurel says. “They have a source swearing you spent the year being treated for an opioid addiction in a Nicaraguan rehab. It’s getting picked up ev
erywhere.”
“Why now?”
Laurel stares at me in confusion.
“Like why didn’t they do any stories back when I actually left?”
“When you left you could have been anywhere, shooting a movie in Canada or the Ukraine, recording an album of Scottish pirate metal songs, I don’t fucking know. The press isn’t going to ask the questions if the fans aren’t asking questions. But now you’re back and you’ve got nothing to show for it, and nothing to say about it, and people are starting to notice. You’re also dressing like my great-aunt Meryl, and not to be rude, but you’re borderline chubby.”
“Wow, Laurel,” I say, trying to will some tears into existence to make her feel bad. “I never stood a chance with friends like you.”
“Do you think you could have Lyme?” Laurel asks, frowning at me.
“I don’t have Lyme disease.”
“Okay, you have to help me then. What are we doing here? Are we doing 2007 Britney? Or a Marilyn thing? Because you’re smarter than this, Grace.”
“Why is everyone more worried about me having a breakdown now than when I was actually having one?”
“Because at least your hair was good then,” Laurel sniffs, and I stick my middle finger up at her. I don’t hate her as much as I should, which probably says a lot about me.
“Honestly? I just want to be normal, Laurel,” I say, but I can hear how cliché it sounds now that I’m back here, and how holing yourself up in your husband’s house with his new girlfriend probably isn’t the best way to go about it.
“No you don’t, Grace, you just think you do,” Laurel says, looking disappointed. “Shall we ask our server if she wants to swap places with you? Do you want me to ask if they’re hiring here?”
