by MV Ellis
Ryan turned to me again. “So do you think you need to call someone… like a professional… to help Marnie?”
“Like a shrink or something, you mean?”
“I guess.”
“Hmm… I’m hoping it won’t get to that, but if it does, I know I’m gonna have a fight on my hands. She’s mentioned in the past that after being forced to see one after her parents died that she never would again, and we all know how stubborn she is. I’m hoping I can somehow find the trigger to snap her out of it before it goes too far.”
“I know it goes without saying, but you know I’m here for you. Jake and Stevie too. Anything you need, we got your back. Right?”
“It definitely goes without saying, but thanks anyway for saying it.”
Thirty-One
Marnie
The phone rang on my nightstand moments after Luke left for the studio. I grabbed it, glancing down at the screen. I wasn’t answering calls from most people, but seeing no caller ID, I decided to take a chance and answer. Forty minutes later, having spoken to an Agent Seacomb, I wished I’d screened the call out along with all the others. His news was not what I wanted to hear. Having reviewed the details I had supplied in my report, he then asked me about a million questions before letting me know the FBI would not be pursuing a criminal investigation in the case.
What? I felt my body deflate as he spoke. I really wasn’t sure how much more shit I could take and still be able to put one foot in front of the other.
He informed me that there wasn’t enough evidence to support the alleged hacking, as I had no proof that I hadn’t shared the video willingly with one or more third party. This was of course true, but on the other hand, I also defied anyone to prove that I had shared it. Of course, there was no proof of that either.
Still, with my lifestyle and the need to leave belongings backstage and generally unattended for extended periods of time while working, there were literally hundreds of people who could have accessed my phone and sent the images onward. Worse still was the likelihood of tracing the more likely culprit, someone virtually hacking my phone through unsecured WiFi networks, email infiltration, or a breach of social media. It would be like looking for a needle in a mythical haystack.
According to Agent Seacomb, all the vagary around the case wouldn’t necessarily have been a limiting factor had there been more evidence of an actual crime—if my identity had been cloned, myself or Arlo had been blackmailed in return for keeping the video secret, I’d been robbed, or even if other celebrities had been recently targeted. As it was, the best he could do was email me the department’s cybersecurity guide and assure me that all the details of the case were now stored in the database, and I’d be informed if anything changed. Great. In the meantime, I apparently needed to choose more secure passwords and enable two-factor encryption for every account and device.
The last few moments of the call put the nail in the coffin of my sanity.
“I’m sure none of this is what you wanted to hear, and I’m truly sorry to be the barer of bad news, but if it’s any consolation, with the information you’ve supplied me, the one thing I probably do have enough evidence for is to prosecute you for what can loosely be categorized as ‘revenge porn,’ under recent legislation pertaining to the distribution of intimate photographs or videos without the other party’s consent. This offense carries a maximum penalty of a $1000 fine and twelve months in jail.” What?
“However, on this occasion, as I’m fairly confident of a lack of malicious intent, I will not be pursuing charges of this nature. Just know that, as in the matter of the alleged phone tampering, that situation could change should new evidence come to light. Please also be aware that the lack of criminal charges does not rule out the possibility of civil penalties brought about by the victim who may choose to sue for compensatory and punitive damages.”
Fuck. My. Life.
As I hung up the phone, I had the strong and overwhelming desire to binge, but at the same time, I equally wanted to resist. I hadn’t succumbed since arriving at Mia’s place, and I really wanted to keep up the good work. I knew if I was going to have any chance at winning the battle raging within me, I needed a distraction. Netflix wasn’t going to cut it, so I hauled myself out of bed, desperately trying to think of something to occupy myself.
As I stumbled out of the bedroom and onto the landing, tears streaming down my face yet again, something stopped me in my tracks. For some reason, I looked up at the ceiling, my eyes zeroing in on the hatch to the attic. I recalled going up there once as a kid with Mia—maybe to get Christmas decorations, or possibly a serving platter for Thanksgiving dinner. I knew that a lot of my mom’s stuff from childhood was up there, and I guessed that the few things Mia had kept after her death were there also.
I couldn’t explain the sudden pull toward that trapdoor, but it was strong. I wiped my nose on the back of my hand. I definitely wasn’t about to win any beauty contests any time soon. I was a grubby, snotty mess—not that I needed to worry about that anymore anyway, given the rapid decline of my modeling career.
I found the pole for the latch and opened the door, bringing the folding stairs down with it. I took a deep breath, not even sure what I was nervous about, and climbed gingerly up the rickety staircase and into the dusty roof space. I shivered, despite the warm and musty atmosphere. It wasn’t a full height space, so I had to bend my five-feet-ten frame a little awkwardly to walk.
Mia wouldn’t have had that problem; she had been quite petite. My mom was more average height at five feet five or six, and apparently, my height was a throwback from the Dutch ancestry on my grandfather’s side. My mother’s father, who had died in a tragic accident before I was even conceived, had been a tall and imposing figure, by all accounts. For sure I didn’t get my stature from my dad. His Vietnamese genes didn’t run tall.
As I expected, the space was stacked with boxes, which judging by the layers of dust covering them, hadn’t been touched for years. I approached the stack cautiously, again not sure what I was afraid of, yet definitely feeling a sense of dread. I kept looking around until a box caught my eye. It said Faith. Faith Aimee Harloe had been my mother’s name. I recognized the script in Sharpie as her handwriting back when it had still been legible. I struggled to lift the faded box from the stack and set it by my feet, taking a deep breath before plucking up the courage to open it. I untucked the flaps, coughing as dust rose in plumes into my face.
No wonder it had been so hard to lift. It appeared to be full of books—classics that looked like any standard high school English curriculum and slim, brightly colored notebooks. I glanced across the novels and marveled at how little had changed since my mom had been at school. I understood that classics were classics for a reason, but it seemed kind of lazy to just dole out the same handful of titles for generations on end.
What I was more interested in was the notebooks. They were too well kept and uniform to be school exercise books. I knew from experience that these came in different shapes and sizes depending on the class and would be tattered and battered by the end of the year, if they even lasted that long—not to mention covered with doodles, graffiti, and stickers. These were definitely not that.
I plucked one from the pile. It was dated, and I knew right away that it was a journal. I opened the front cover, and my suspicion was immediately confirmed. It was quite clearly a diary entry in my mother’s handwriting. Doing some quick math, it looked as though she would have been thirteen at the time it was written. The same age I was when she died.
I pulled out the rest of the books and found them to have been meticulously filed and labeled from the date of the first entry to the last. I laid them all out in order. Sixteen books in total documenting four years of my mom’s life from the age of thirteen through sixteen, almost seventeen. I opened the first one and started reading. I felt weird, snooping on my mom as a teenager, especially considering how things had ended for her. On the other hand, she’d been almost a stra
nger to me in many ways, and I felt compelled to know more about her.
Mia had been happy to talk about Faith up to a point but would always clam up when I pushed for specific details. She’d say she didn’t know, or that my mom didn’t share that information with her, but I often got the sense that she was holding back. Not lying as such but somehow not telling me the whole truth. I thought that maybe in reading her diaries, prying on her private thoughts, I’d get to know her better. Maybe I’d be able to understand why things had been the way they had. Why I was the way I was. I had never felt close to my mom. For as long as I could remember, she had been a distant figure in my life, even when she was right next to me. They both had, she and my father. All they seemed to see was each other.
I quickly made my way through the first journal, then the next. It was the usual teenage nonsense. The boys she liked (cue school girl giggling), dramas with her frenemies, what she liked to watch on TV, eat, listen to, and wear, and what shops she visited at the mall, what celebrities she wanted to marry when she grew up, which teachers she liked (almost none), and which grown-ups pissed her off (almost all, especially her long-suffering parents). It was drama on the most micro of micro levels. There were doodles and stickers and photos taped in, as well as folded class notes, concert tickets, shopping receipts. It was like an exhibit in a museum, or a time capsule. A slice of life of the average all-American thirteen-year-old girl. I loved it.
I was three books in, and they were all in the same vein. A happy—predictably miserable but really happy—girl just like her peers. However, halfway through the fourth book, something changed. Suddenly the posts became darker, gloomier, and more pessimistic. There was less about her day-to-day actives and more stream of consciousness rants and insights into what was going on in her mind. None of it was good.
It was shocking to note the difference in such a short space of time, and I immediately wanted to know what the fuck had happened to the happy-go-lucky kid from a few pages ago. Many of her entries were now sketches done in black ballpoint pen. They were amazing—my mom had been a talented artist, though she’d never gotten it together to make those skills work for her. Instead, she’d survived by scoring an endless stream of thankless menial jobs until either she or her employer showed their true colors, and it was back to the unemployment office.
The next book wasn’t any better. In fact, it was arguably worse. Positive words or sentiments seemed to be fewer and farther between. It was like she’d had a personality transplant overnight, but I knew that couldn’t have been the case. Something had happened, and I wanted to know what. I read on, desperate for clues, but all I could find were a few oblique references to a “he” I couldn’t identify by any other means. It didn’t appear to be my grandfather, a teacher, or any of the boys from school she’d mentioned. He also didn’t seem to be good. In fact, he seemed very bad. For my mom, at least. Who the fuck was he?
I read on. Mom’s life was gradually falling apart at the seams—her grades were slipping, her school attendance was patchy, she was getting detentions regularly for cutting classes, incomplete homework, and fights, even. Her relationships with just about everybody around her—her frenemies, parents, teachers, everyone—seemed to be hanging in the balance. What the fuck?
She started smoking weed and hanging with the wrong crowd. School seemed to be an optional annoyance—somewhere she very seldom dignified with her presence. Though when she did bother to attend, most of her time seemed to be spent in detention for this infraction or that. I wished I could go back in time and shake her teachers by the lapels. Were there no guidance counselors? Nobody who gave a fuck about the kids beyond ensuring they were ticked off the roll so that the school district wouldn’t come down on them about attendance figures?
Wasn’t a kid like my mom a big red flag? A girl who had gone from model student—happy, popular, well adjusted, toeing the line—to sullen, depressive, angry, disruptive, and withdrawn almost from one day to the next, and nobody tried to find out what the fuck had caused the sudden switcheroo? It was fucking negligence, pure and simple.
According to young Faith, her parents weren’t much better at understanding what the hell was going on with her. They yelled and screamed and nagged and begged and cajoled and pleaded and bullied. What they didn’t ever do, it would seem, was ask the real questions needed to find out what was going on with their own goddamned kid.
My father seemed to be the one person in the world who didn’t just write Mom off but took the time to get to know her and find out what was breaking her. Ironically, they had met in detention at school. My father had been a model student, whom my mother had described in her journal as the ultimate geek. Having seen the few photos he owned of himself growing up—the rest had been left at his family home when he’d fled one night after another blowup about my mother—I concurred with that viewpoint. He had only been in detention that day because of a scuffle in the lunchroom where he’d defended one of his even geekier friends who was being bullied.
Though on the face of it, they had nothing in common—even before Mom had gone rogue—they hit it off immediately. They connected on a human level, and for both it was love from the very first moment. The rest, as they say, is history. They were like a young Bonnie and Clyde, cliché though that was. That day in detention had sealed their fate and mine.
It was my dad who had encouraged my mom to confront her parents about “him.” Telling her that they needed to know and to take responsibility for stopping what was happening. He told her they needed to make sure “he” was dealt with in the way he deserved. He said he’d support her throughout, and I honestly believed he had, for all the good that had done either of them in the end.
Encouraged by his words of support, my mother had chosen a family dinner one Sunday to tell her parents that “he,” her father’s best friend, Stephen, and a close family friend, had been raping her since just after her fourteenth birthday. Her father’s first response had been shock and then disbelief, then anger at my mom. They had argued, and it wasn’t pretty. My grandfather had slammed out of the house as my mother screamed the last words she was ever to say to him. “I hate you, and I hope you die.” He had taken off on his bike, probably to clear his mind. The police report said he’d been speeding down a winding coastal road and careened into an oncoming semitrailer, dying on impact. In many ways, my mom had died with him.
Thirty-Two
Luke
Just as we were winding up our conversation, Arlo started trying to call us to order, clearing his throat then whistling between his fingers. Loudly. It had the desired effect. Everyone stopped and looked his way—everyone except Jake and his puppy-induced, sleep-deprived self.
Stevie kicked at Jake’s sneaker-clad foot until he jerked awake, looking shocked, then pissed off that his nap had been cut short. “What?”
We all looked from Jake to Arlo who seemed uncharacteristically sheepish. I had no idea what the fuck was happening, which made me feel on edge. To say we’d had our issues over the years was a vast understatement, but these days barring a road bump here and there, until recently, Arlo and I had been tight.
I felt like the issues with Marnie and London were driving a wedge between us again, and I couldn’t entirely blame Arlo for that. After all, I had been the one holed up with Marnie since finding her at Mia’s house. And even before that, I’d been so preoccupied with thinking about Marnie—where she was, how she was, and how I could track her down—that I had barely remembered to check in with Arlo to see how he was doing.
As tough as he was, he was human like the rest of us, and I had my eyes open enough to realize that the shit going down with London was affecting him deeply. I hadn’t staged the intervention lightly. Calling my mom and asking her to step in with some advice from another woman’s perspective had been pretty much a last resort in my eyes. Not the least of reasons being that I had known Arlo would hate me for it. So it sucked doubly that I’d been so self-absorbed lately.
&n
bsp; Arlo went on to tell us that life had thrown him a wakeup call, and he was going to be making some changes as a result, fueled by his overwhelming desire to win London back and because he’d been keeping a secret that none of us would have predicted in a billion years.
“I’m going to be a father, so I guess—”
Arlo had to stop speaking while Ryan nearly choked to death on his coffee. It was like a scene out of a Marx Brothers movie. Everything he did seemed to make the situation worse, as he spilled more burning hot liquid on himself. It was kind of funny but less so because for a moment I genuinely thought he might legitimately need a visit to the ER. By the time the coughing eventually subsided, Jake was laughing so hard at Ryan’s misfortune that tears streamed down his face, and I thought he was going to croak from an asthma attack. Once they’d both gotten themselves under control and I didn’t have to worry about taking anyone to the hospital, the magnitude of Arlo’s revelation started to sink in.
I could hardly believe what I’d just heard. Even more so that Arlo never said a thing to me as it all went down. I used to pride myself on being the solid twin, the one everyone, especially Arlo, could always rely on to show up for them. To have their back no matter what. As had been happening a lot since the video broke, I was again questioning what I thought I’d always known about myself as a person.
Maybe I’d found it so easy to be the dependable one of the two of us not because it was who I was naturally, but because I didn’t have any major dramas of my own to deal with for all those years. Maybe it was because I was too busy watching life from the sidelines, dwarfed in Arlo’s shadow, rather than getting down and dirty, just like Jake and Marnie had said.
