He shouted my name again, but I slammed the door and cranked the engine. Music roared from the speakers. Patti Smith’s voice crooned at me to “ask the angels,” but I cut her off. I rammed my finger into the eject button and tossed the tape through the window as I peeled off down the driveway and out of Carlisle for good.
July 1992
Louisa was always acutely aware of Emily’s birthdays. On the morning of Emily’s sixteenth, she awoke thinking, Sixteen. She rubbed away mascara and clumps of sleep to peel her eyes open. It was nearly one in the afternoon. She and Colette had been hitting the Whisky or the Jabberjaw or some bar in West Hollywood every night for over a week. It was Tuesday or Wednesday, Louisa wasn’t really sure, but she knew the date, July 7. She felt Emily’s name kicking around in her stomach, the same way her feet had pattered inside of her womb all those years ago. She felt the number sixteen pulsating beneath her skin.
Louisa stumbled to the bathroom, passing Colette, who napped on the couch, music videos on the TV barely audible. The water in the shower seemed to thump out the same pattern, speaking to Louisa. Sixteen, my baby’s sixteen.
She had no idea what Emily’s life was like anymore because she no longer received updates from Molly. Louisa had completely given up on returning to her old life after her “fresh start” in Boston had failed miserably. She’d searched for a legitimate job for three months until resigning herself to stripping again out of desperation. Then came the pills. She needed them to numb herself to what she was doing, but getting strung out made her active line of work impossible. The last night in Boston, Louisa passed out in the dressing room and woke up in the parking lot to the manager clocking her, calling her a dumb junkie whore who put his club’s license in jeopardy. Louisa didn’t talk back, just collapsed to the ground, not even balling up to protect herself from his blows like she had when Eric had beaten her back at River’s Edge.
Colette came running out, throwing her stilettos at the manager, clawing his face, and shouting that it was the worst place they’d ever worked. The next thing Louisa knew, she was in the car, Nadia and their few possessions packed in the back. As Boston grew smaller behind them, Louisa studied her black eye in the mirror, knowing it meant she would never go home. She took off her wedding ring and cut contact with Molly completely. It was too cruel to let Molly go on believing that one day she could be convinced to come home, and it hurt too much to get news about the daughter she knew she would never see again.
Over four years had passed since Louisa had fled Boston and decided she’d never feel good enough to return to her family, but it never stopped haunting her. She’d moved on but hadn’t forgotten. She still expected her wedding ring to catch on her hair as she washed it. And drugs, alcohol, even the meanest hangover couldn’t mask her longing for Emily, especially on days like this one.
After Louisa dressed, she meandered back into the living room. Nadia sat on the floor in front of the couch, doodling in a notebook on the coffee table. Louisa regarded the little girl with the moon-shaped face. Her hazel eyes were always wide and wondering, but her sun-streaked hair often fell over them, a shield between her and the world. Her presence was the exact opposite of Colette’s wild, loud nature. Nadia soothed Colette. After hard nights—fights with boyfriends in crowded clubs or when she drank to the point that it stirred memories of her lonely North Carolina teenage years with an overprotective father—Colette crawled into her daughter’s bed. Nadia would sigh, roll over, and embrace her mother, pressing her little body against Colette’s and wrapping her fingers in Colette’s stiffly hair-sprayed hair, comforting her without even waking. Sitting there in front of the couch, Nadia resembled a gatekeeper, protecting her mother.
For a moment, Louisa doubted her decision to give her daughter up. Maybe Emily could have consoled her like that, healed her. But then Louisa looked more closely at Nadia. She seemed like a miniature adult. Emily hadn’t been like that at nine, Louisa knew from the letters and pictures Molly’d sent back then. At nine, Emily was as pale as Nadia was tan, and her mint-green eyes were replicas of Louisa’s, mischievous, beckoning silly trouble. Well, Louisa’s had been like that once; now they were as serious as Nadia’s, introspective and distant.
Life should have turned out better for Nadia, and it almost had.
Oakland came after Boston. Things hadn’t improved there, but after a year of fighting with drug dealers in the living room while Louisa snuggled next to Nadia on the bed, trying to keep her from crying, Colette decided that the part of California she really loved was L.A. Louisa chose to continue north to Portland, and she and Colette parted ways.
Colette’s luck changed in Southern California. She met an actor named Brad and they got married in the fall of 1989. Brad even paid for Louisa to fly down and be Colette’s maid of honor. Colette vowed to Louisa, “Now I won’t have to come running to you anymore. And my little girl”—she squeezed Nadia, who’d been allowed to wear fairy wings with her mini bridesmaid’s dress—“will never want for anything again!”
Then, in the summer of 1990, just after Nadia’s seventh birthday, Colette banged on the door of Louisa’s apartment in Portland. “I cashed in big, baby. Big!” she exclaimed as she thundered into the living room in her chunky black shoes, fluffing her magenta-tipped hair, which matched her magenta-striped stockings. Nadia trailed behind like the train of a garish wedding dress, her honey-colored head bowed as she chewed on her nails.
It was the first time Colette had ever shown up without tears threatening to spill from her seafoam eyes, clutching Nadia like a life preserver. Instead Colette glowed, her skin a healthy tan, teeth movie-star white, makeup shimmering. Louisa smiled as Colette plopped down on the overstuffed gray sofa. “Did you win the lottery or something?”
“Better. Alimony.” Colette beamed. Nadia perched on the couch next to her mother, drawing a small, plastic animal from the pocket of her overalls. She cupped the little lion in her hands and peeked at it with a furtive smile as if the twenty-five-cent vending-machine toy were a long-lost jewel.
“You and Brad are getting divorced?” Louisa gaped.
“He was”—Colette’s hands, still glittering with the various platinum bands Brad had bought her, clamped over Nadia’s ears—“screwing his agent. Ha! He was such a terrible actor, I guess I should’ve wondered how he was getting those roles.”
“Wow, I’m sorry to hear—”
“Don’t be! He’s got to pay for a house, clothes, accessories …” Colette gave an exaggerated wink, clasped Louisa’s hand, and transferred a small vial into it. “And babysitters. I want you to come back to L.A. and live with us, let me repay you for all the times you’ve bailed us out.”
“You don’t have to do that. After Oakland, I’m done with California, and I’m trying to be done with this.” Louisa passed the vial back to Colette.
“Well, you don’t have to do that. I need to quit anyway, for Nadia.” She flicked her fingers around the vial like a magician making a quarter disappear up his sleeve. “But California, c’mon, Louisa! Portland is, like”—Colette’s thickly mascaraed lashes fluttered—“you might as well move back to Wisconsin.”
Louisa’s jaw clenched at the reference. Then she said, “I left my daughter because I knew she’d be better off without me. Why do you want me around yours?”
“’Cause Nadia loves you and she likes having more than just me around.” Colette turned to the pudgy-cheeked girl. “Right?”
Nadia wrinkled her brow. “I miss Brad.”
“But you would like it if Louisa came to live with us, right? That would be fun. All girls.”
“Yeah.” Nadia nodded, her golden face lit up by a full smile.
“Can ya really say no to that?” Colette pressed.
Louisa’s green eyes remained full of lingering doubt. “I don’t know. The scene here is good and I was thinking of going farther north. Olympia. Seattle. Something amazing is happening there.”
“How dreary.” Colette screwed up h
er face and turned to her daughter with an even goofier expression that made Nadia giggle. “Tell Louisa the scene is always great in sunny Los Angeles.”
Nadia mimicked Colette’s words exactly and then added what probably made much more sense to her: “You can sleep on the floor in my room.”
“I’ll come,” Louisa finally agreed with a sigh, “but just for a little while. You know how I feel about staying in one place for too long. Bad things happen.”
But before she knew it, two years passed, the longest Louisa had gone without packing up and leaving. She’d moved to L.A. to make the divorce easier on Nadia and Colette. Unfortunately, Colette’s way of coping involved heavy partying, and Louisa found herself sucked right back into it. She watched the scene in the Pacific Northwest erupt as she’d predicted, but the vial of coke in her handbag made her forget her desire to be there instead of California. She and Colette also forgot about Nadia’s needs more often than they should have.
Louisa pushed her thoughts and memories aside, returning her attention to Nadia, who still sat in front of a sleeping Colette. “Hey, Nadia,” she managed to say. “You bored?”
Nadia glanced up from her drawing and nodded. Her best friend, Brenda, had been gone for almost a week, visiting her grandparents, and Nadia had nothing to do but ride her bike alone in the parking lot.
“Let’s wake your mom and go somewhere,” Louisa suggested, sparking a grin from Nadia. “Come on, let’s tickle her feet!”
They each attacked a bare sole until Colette’s pearly painted toenails were flying through the air and she was up, giggling.
“We’re bored, Mom,” Nadia declared.
Pulling Nadia onto her lap, Colette scraped long fingernails through her own unruly hair and lit a cigarette. “Shopping?” she suggested, blinking her sapphire eyes.
Colette took them to her favorite Melrose boutiques, where Nadia played dress-up and dutifully commented on all the outfits Colette tried on. Louisa let her mind wander again. Her heartbeat sounded out the syllables of her daughter’s name, and now images of Emily were coming into her head, too. She had a box of photos and letters from Molly in the back of her closet. She rarely looked at them anymore, but she felt driven to go home, sift through them, and trace her daughter’s journey right up to the cusp of becoming a teenager; Emily’s sixth-grade school photo was the last one Louisa had received.
“Lou?” Colette called from the cash register, where she flicked through her wallet for a credit card that wasn’t maxed.
“What?” Louisa asked as she slowly headed toward Colette and Nadia.
“Aren’t you going to get something to wear out tonight?”
“Oh, I don’t think I’m gonna go.”
“Not gonna go? It’s going to be such a time! Becca’s in town. You know you’re going.” Colette wagged her head and turned to her daughter. “I think Louisa is, like, on a sugar crash or something. What do you say we go get dinner at Pink’s? I think she needs a hot dog and a big strawberry milk shake.”
Nadia’s face brightened. “I think I need a hot dog and a milk shake!”
“You do, do you?” Colette scrawled her signature across the receipt, grabbed her bags in one hand, her daughter’s hand in the other, and paraded out the door, Louisa straggling behind.
When they finally got back to their apartment, Louisa shut herself in her room, poured out the box of letters, and read over them until it got so dark she was forced to turn on a light. As she did so, Colette rapped on the door. “You better get in the shower. Nadia’s in bed, the babysitter’ll be here in half an hour, and then we can cruise.”
Louisa opened the door a crack, pushed her hair behind her ear, and said, “No, really, I’m not feeling so hot. You should just head out. Cancel the sitter. I’ll be here.”
It took a little bit of convincing, but finally Colette was backing out of the parking lot and Louisa was alone except for Nadia’s soft breathing down the hall. Louisa returned to her closet and brought out another box containing letters. These letters, however, were all in Louisa’s handwriting, all addressed to Emily, and all still bound in black spiral notebooks.
Every birthday, at Christmas, and on some late nights when she couldn’t sleep, Louisa wrote her daughter a letter. The letters always started the same, with a reference to the occasion, something like, “Merry Christmas, Emily! Have you been good this year?” or, if there was no occasion to reference, simply, “Hi, baby.” The second line was always the same, too: “I miss you.” And from there, Louisa went on to ask Emily things about herself, what she liked, how school was, what music she listened to. When she ran out of questions to ask her daughter, she considered telling her about her life, but she always stopped short, certain there was only one thing that her daughter wanted to know—why Louisa had left her when she was just an infant—and that was one question Louisa wasn’t ready to answer. So she would sign the letter, “I love you with all my heart, Mom,” and close the notebook. She spent the next couple days thinking about whether to send it to Molly and have Molly pass it on to Emily, but of course she never did. She just accumulated tattered notebooks filled with unsent letters.
Louisa searched for a pen on her nightstand. The state of it—crisscrossed with razor-blade scratches filled in with a white film of cocaine, scattered pills that she knew by size and color, and empty glasses that smelled of sticky-sweet drinks—told the story of her life in L.A. Louisa’s cheeks burned in shame, but it made her all the more determined to write the letter. Sixteen was an important age, a turning point, Louisa knew. After all, it was the year her own life had changed, the year the thing had happened that would eventually keep her from her daughter.
Happy Birthday, baby. I miss you, Louisa started, as usual, but the third line was one she had never written before. I wish I could be there, and that was where the letter shifted. Maybe you wish I could, too, but you shouldn’t. I’m not coming back, Emily, and I guess it’s probably time that I tell you why. I don’t want you to think that I left because I didn’t want you. I wanted you more than anything I’ve ever wanted, and so did your father, and I’m glad I was able to give him the best part of me—you. Just as I wasn’t able to be the mother I dreamed of being, I also wasn’t able to be the wife he deserved. You’ll find that sometimes there is a huge valley between what we want to be and what we’re capable of. Or maybe you won’t, maybe the only ones who have those limitations are people who’ve done terrible things. People like me.
The worst night of my life was the night I left you and your father, then drove up to Carlisle to say good-bye to Molly, my oldest and truest friend. But it had been coming for years, a result of the second-worst night of my life.
That was when Louisa knew she was about to confess the whole gruesome story. She knew as soon as she put his name down on paper for the first time, she wasn’t going to be able to stop.
I suppose—if the folks in Carlisle still love to chatter as much as they used to—that you’ve heard about Eric Lisbon, the boy I dated when I was your age, right before I met your father. I’m sure they still talk about his suicide and maybe they still blame me for it. I listened to people gossip about that for almost two years before your dad and I ran off together. They talked about how much Eric loved me and how I’d obviously broken his heart when I cheated on him with Michael. That’s fanciful Carlisle storytelling for you. Eric didn’t really love me, not the way people are supposed to love anyway, but, despite that, I was never involved with your father while I was with Eric. However, I was responsible for Eric’s death and I’m actually surprised that no one ever figured out how. You’d think that in a town that loves to theorize about everything, someone would have wondered if Eric really pulled that trigger himself.
He didn’t. I did. And that’s why I’m not with you today.
Louisa lifted her pen from the page. She felt she needed something—a line, a pill, a drink—if she was going to relive the rest, but she stopped herself, thinking, This has to be totally coh
erent. If you are finally going to tell this, you have to do it right. Instead, she lit a cigarette, inhaling and exhaling slowly until it burned down to the filter. Then she was ready to finish.
Louisa described it to her daughter the same way she’d told Colette the night they’d driven through Carlisle—explained how Eric had beaten her, raped her, and how she’d shot him when he came after her again. But telling the story to Emily didn’t absolve Louisa of her guilt. She wrote bitterly, Molly says the rape was Eric’s suicide. She says if he hadn’t wanted a gun to his head, he would have kept his dick in his pants. She says if I hadn’t killed him, she would have, or Luke would have, or your father would have. All three of them tried to reassure me in their various ways, your father doing the best job by taking me away from Carlisle, giving me a chance at a new life.
It was supposed to be a beautiful life. You were supposed to grow up in the city my parents had taken me from when I was ten, thinking they were protecting me by raising me someplace quieter and safer. But then, when I was about five months pregnant with you, as far along as Molly was with Marissa when I killed Eric, everything came rushing back. I dreamt about the rape and the murder almost every night, and I was convinced that you could see those dreams. Maybe you could, maybe buried deep in your subconscious are both of those horrible scenes. I felt worse and worse each passing day, but I hid it from your father, from Molly, from everyone.
I thought once you were born, once you came out healthy, perfect in every way, it would all dissipate. But it didn’t. I still had nightmares. I heard Eric’s voice in my head, repeating what he said before he dragged me down to his basement and raped me: “You think things are over between us, Louisa? It’ll never be over.”
He was right. It wasn’t. Even though you were no longer inside of me, I felt like I passed all of my guilt on to you in my breast milk. And I knew it would never end. It would be in my kisses, my hugs, the food I cooked, my whispers. It was surrounding me and I didn’t want it to rub off on you or your father. You shouldn’t pay for what I’ve done. And besides, how could I teach you when I had made so many mistakes? How could I tell you about right and wrong when I had done the ultimate wrong? So I left.
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