by Mary McCoy
I scanned the room, but eventually my eye landed on the rooster. It was ugly, but it did get your attention, I’ll give it that. And then something else got my attention. Down in the lower corner, I noticed the painting was signed B. Grf, 12/4/42. I didn’t care who B. Grif was, but I was interested in the date, which was conveniently combination-like.
And sure enough, a 12 right, 4 left, and 42 right later, I felt the lock catch. Inside, the safe was empty except for a little cash and an envelope with the Insignia Pictures logo in the corner. The words PHOTOS—DO NOT BEND were stamped on the front. My father was always carrying around a stack of these envelopes, all of them stuffed with publicity photos for one movie star or another. When I opened this one, the first picture in the stack was of a woman I didn’t recognize wearing a skimpy bathing suit. I wasn’t sure what made this envelope worth locking up.
Before I could go through the rest of the envelope’s contents, I heard a hacking cough, followed by footsteps in the upstairs hallway. Quietly, I stole over to the door, turned out the light, and stood perfectly still, my heart pounding. I heard water running in the bathroom, and then the footsteps leading back to the bedroom.
It was risky to stay here much longer, and definitely too risky to turn the light on again, but I couldn’t stand to leave the envelope behind, even if I didn’t know what it was. My father might move it or change the combination on the safe to something less obvious. So I took it, along with the matchbook that said MARTY’S and the postcard from Annie.
Now all I had to do was go to bed and wait for morning. And I realized: maybe it wasn’t the worst thing in the world that I’d broken the lock on the desk and faked a burglary. If my father called the police to report it, I’d know he had nothing to hide. And if he didn’t, well, then it could mean just about anything, none of it good.
The last fight Annie had with our parents was the worst, even though I was only there for the end of it. My former best friend, Cassie Jurgens, invited me to the beach that day, and we’d spent the afternoon racing barefoot in the sand and dodging the surf at the Santa Monica Pier. We bought ice cream and bottles of soda, and draped webs of kelp over our shoulders, pretending we were movie stars in fur coats. I was Bette Davis and she was Joan Crawford, and we strutted back and forth with our noses up in the air, speaking in trilling, theatrical voices.
“Joanie, dear, why ever did we come to a public beach?”
“Why, Bette, darling, we must study the common people to hone our craft.”
We made ourselves laugh until we fell down in the sand, then ran into the surf to rinse the smelly kelp off our shoulders.
Cassie lived next door to us, but we weren’t just friends out of convenience. We both loved movies and went to see a matinee together almost every week. After the movie was over, we’d pool our remaining money and go to the drugstore to buy the latest issues of Screenland and Photoplay and Motion Picture Magazine. Cassie cut out the movie star pictures and copied the poses in her bedroom mirror, while I studied the articles themselves, looking for stories about the stars at my father’s studio. Back in those days I was like most kids. I was still proud of my father and what he did for a living.
Having Cassie for a best friend didn’t do much to discourage me of that idea. She was a little bit in awe of my family—my mother, who told stories about the time she was a chorus girl alongside Myrna Loy, or how John Barrymore once lent her his umbrella; my sister, who floated out the door wrapped in silk and chiffon, on her way to one performance or another. Even though we’d been friends for years, she still got tongue-tied around them.
Sometimes it annoyed me, and yet Cassie had such a good heart it was easy to overlook things like that. Maybe we were too old to be playing movie stars at the beach, but I didn’t care. That afternoon, Cassie and I came through the back door together, tracking sand all over the kitchen floor and singing at the tops of our lungs, “Would you like to swing on a star? Carry moonbeams home in a jar? And be better off than you are? Or would you rather be a pig?”
Then we heard the fighting in the living room.
“A man shouldn’t have to pick his sixteen-year-old daughter up from the police station,” my father bellowed.
I heard my mother sobbing, then Annie’s voice, hard and bitter in a way it hadn’t been.
“Sure, Daddy, that must have been real rough on you.”
Then the sound of a slap.
I stood frozen in the kitchen, the next words of the song still stuck in my throat: A pig is an animal with dirt on his face. His shoes are a terrible disgrace.
Cassie covered her mouth with her hands, her eyes wide. I’m sure she was worried, just like I was, but in that moment, all I could think was that my family was just another movie magazine to her, full of spectacle and drama.
“Get out of here,” I whispered. Her cheeks flushed red, and a hurt look crossed her face. “I mean it.”
Cassie picked up her bag and ran out the back door, while I went crashing down the hall and into the living room. Annie stood rubbing her cheek, and I ran to her, threading my arm through hers. My parents were standing together, my mother’s head buried in my father’s shoulder.
“Leave her alone,” I shouted at them.
My father took a step toward me. “Go to your room, Alice. This doesn’t concern you.”
Annie shrugged free from my grasp and reached into her pocketbook for a cigarette. With a defiant look on her face, she lit it and blew the smoke into their faces. My father slapped Annie again, this time on the other cheek. The cigarette flew out of her mouth and landed near the red Persian rug. The fringe began to smoke, and I stamped it out with my foot.
“You’re lucky I got there when I did, and I want you to admit that much to me.” A pained look crossed his face. “I’m your father. I deserve that much.”
Annie chortled. “Yup, I’m a real lucky girl.”
My mother sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. Her eyes were bleary and red-rimmed from more than her tears. Sober, she would have used a handkerchief.
“Annie, why couldn’t you just let your father take care of this? Why did you have to get involved?”
My mother inhaled sharply, then ran a hand through her blond hair, smoothing the curls that had been pressed against my father’s shoulder.
“At least your father still has a job, but, Annie, dear, I think you’re going to have to forget about that screen test.”
Annie stared at her in disbelief. “Do you really think I care about a screen test now?”
I followed very little of what was going on that day, but I knew about the screen test. Two years of party dresses and singing to strangers had finally landed Annie a chance to read for a supporting role in the new Buddy Pratchett comedy—Polly, the smart-mouthed kid who believes her big sister’s fiance is a gold-digging scoundrel. But of course, it’s all a big misunderstanding. Buddy Pratchett winds up being a stand-up guy, and Polly says she’s sorry for all the trouble she stirred up and sings a song at her big sister’s wedding.
Cassie and I went to see it when it came out, but I walked out of the theater before it was over. It was exactly the kind of movie that my sister would have hated. Besides, the girl they cast as Polly didn’t have a singing voice half as good as Annie’s, and her eyes were too close together.
“I expect you to care,” my father said. “I pulled a lot of strings to get this for you, and you pay me back in hysterics.”
“Hysterics?”
For a long time, Annie stood there, staring at the singed spot on the carpet, until finally, she lifted her head and said, “I don’t think there’s anything else to say about it.”
She walked out the front door then, and my parents simply watched her go. I stood there for a moment, trying to make sense of what had just happened. Then, without thinking, I followed her out the door, running down the sidewalk after her and screaming her name. At the end of the block, I finally caught up with her, and by that time, some of the neigh
bors had come outside to see what all the screaming was about. Annie narrowed her eyes at me, and I burst into tears.
“Don’t make a scene, Alice.”
She sounded so unlike herself, so cold and cruel, it only made me cry harder.
“Annie, what’s happening?”
Her expression softened, and she dropped to her knees, hugging me around the waist.
“Oh, Alice,” she said, leaning her head against my belly. “Ali, I have to go away for a while.”
“But why?”
She looked up at me, and I saw there were tears in her eyes, the first she’d shed over any fight with our parents.
“I can’t tell you.”
I started to explain that we were sisters and she could tell me anything, that she knew I wouldn’t rat, but she put a finger to my lips.
“It’s not that, and it’s not that I don’t think you’re old enough to understand. Ali, there’s no one I trust more in the world, so please believe me when I say it’s better if you don’t know.”
I shook my head, dizzy with all the details. I had so many questions, I didn’t know where to begin.
Finally, I asked the most sensible of the questions swimming around in my head. “Where will you go? What about your clothes and things?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. I have a place.”
She let go of me and stood up. Everyone on our block had suddenly decided that their lawns needed tending, and I could feel their eyes pinned to our backs. Annie lowered her voice and put her hands on my shoulders.
“I’ll write to you once I get settled in,” she said, wiping her eyes. “Will you write back to me?”
I nodded again, speechless.
“Ali, I need you to do one more thing for me.”
“Anything,” I said.
“Don’t believe anything they say. Not about me, not about anything.”
She squeezed my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead.
“I’ll see you soon, Alice,” she said. “I promise.”
She got to her feet, brushed her palms off on the hem of her skirt, and walked away. I stood on the sidewalk and watched her go, not caring about the neighbors’ stares. I watched until she turned the corner and disappeared from sight. She didn’t look back, not even once.
I went back to the house. I had to. I had no place else to go. When I came in through the front door, my parents were seated side by side in the front parlor, holding hands—a united front.
“Sit down, Alice,” my mother said. “There are some things we need to talk about.”
Within a month, I’d heard several versions of the story.
In the version my parents told me, Annie had made it clear that she no longer wanted to be a part of our family and had gone off to live with her so-called friends. I was told in no uncertain terms that if I ever began to associate with a bad crowd, I’d be sent to boarding school quicker than you could say Jack Robinson, and that Annie’s shame should stand as a lesson to me about what happened to girls who turned their backs on their families.
In other words, they didn’t tell me a thing.
At school, the stories of Annie’s sudden disappearance were more specific and, at times, explicit, though I didn’t believe them, either. In one, she’d run off with a gang that ran dope and girls up and down Highway 1. In another, she’d been caught in a compromising position—with whom was a matter of great speculation, and possibilities ranged from the school janitor to the head of Paramount Pictures.
At first, I tried standing up for Annie, but that only made it worse. People intensified their efforts, needling me for information I didn’t have. The worst thing was, they didn’t even care about her. They just hated not knowing, and when I wouldn’t tell them, they hated me, too.
Every morning when I walked to school, I told myself, You are Philip Marlowe. You are Sam Spade. You are ice, you are stone, and nothing can touch you.
If you tell yourself something like that enough, you begin to believe it, but that’s a problem, too.
Better watch out or your face will freeze that way.
Every day after school I checked the mailbox for a letter from Annie. After a month with no word, I started to worry and to wonder what might have kept her from writing to me. I imagined all kinds of terrible scenarios, many of them as lurid as the stories circulating around school—Annie kidnapped by gangsters or murdered in a ditch.
Eventually I decided to ask around. There were people out there, I reminded myself, who cared about Annie, who weren’t just chasing after her story. And even if those people didn’t know what had become of her, at least they weren’t likely to lie to me.
First, I went to the drive-in parking lot where Annie’s friends met after school. My parents didn’t approve of any of these people—the girls wore tight sweaters and bright red lipstick, while the boys pegged their pants and rolled packs of cigarettes into the sleeves of their T-shirts. Of course, more damning than their appearance was the fact that none of them breathed the rarified air of our neighborhood, and none of their fathers lunched at the Cocoanut Grove or had memberships at the Los Angeles Athletic Club.
When I walked up to them in the parking lot, they recognized me right away, and the girls all hugged me and cried, while the boys bought me more sodas than I could possibly drink. They all asked about Annie, and nobody seemed to know much of anything. She hadn’t been coming around lately anyway, they said, and no one knew where she’d been going after school.
Randall Pensler was more or less the leader of their circle, and I knew that for a month or so, he’d almost been Annie’s boyfriend. She’d snuck out the window to meet him a few times, but then our parents got wind of it and made her break it off. My coming around seemed to make Randall uneasy, and he found reasons to avoid looking my way, so I was surprised when he offered me a ride home. He was quiet on the drive and smiled a sad, weary smile when I asked if he’d let me out a few blocks from our house.
“Annie used to make me do that,” he said, pulling up to the curb. I thanked him and started to get out of his beat-up coupe.
“Alice, wait,” he said, grabbing my arm. “I remember there was this guy.”
“What guy?”
“I don’t think she would have gone with him, but there was a guy named Rex who hung out at this bar I used to take her to. I’d leave her alone for five seconds and when I came back, he’d always be right there chatting her up. Said he was some kind of talent scout, but it seemed shady.”
“Annie would never get mixed up with someone like that,” I said. “She knows real talent scouts.”
“I know, I know. Annie was too smart for that.” He shook his head vehemently. “But she was always saying that she was going to be a singer and that she wanted to do it without your dad’s help. I wonder if maybe she saw a chance and took it.”
I nodded. Annie was impetuous. There was no denying that. Randall studied my face, which was twisted up in thought, and shrugged. “It probably wasn’t anything.”
“No, probably not,” I said.
As I got out of the car, I noticed him staring at me with sad eyes.
“You look just like her, you know,” he whispered.
I knew it wasn’t true, but his words still made me blush, and I hurried to close the car door behind me.
Maybe Annie’s friends hadn’t forgotten about her, but my parents hadn’t even spoken her name in front of me since the day she left home. Night after night we sat at the table, not speaking, eating one solemn roast beef dinner after another until I couldn’t take it anymore.
One night, when my father asked me to pass the butter, I said, “You act like she never existed.”
His mustache twitched, and he reached over my plate and got the butter himself.
“Annie does not intend to come back,” he said. “She made that much clear to your mother and me.”
“You’re lying,” I said. “She wouldn’t do that to me.”
My mother took my h
and in hers.
“Honey,” she said, “I know that you and Annie were very close.”
“Are very close,” I said.
She squeezed my fingers and acted like she hadn’t heard me. “But your sister isn’t well. She’s not herself. She’s not our Annie anymore. And we can hope with all our hearts that she comes back to us someday, but we can’t dwell on what’s happened or how we used to be.”
“It doesn’t mean we’re forgetting her,” my father added. “It means we have to move forward with our lives.”
Even then, I knew the difference between moving forward and running away, and I knew which one this was. They might have moved forward, but I didn’t. I didn’t forget her. And I didn’t forget who took her from me.
Without Annie, everything seemed empty. I still went to the movies with Cassie, but the only ones I wanted to see anymore were the gangster pictures that ended in a hail of bullets. Paging through movie magazines only made me think about my father and how I blamed him for driving Annie away; my mother and how she’d pushed Annie into a life she’d never wanted. Cassie seemed to understand, and she clipped her movie star pictures quietly while I hunched in the corner of her bedroom, reading my crime novels.
Eventually, I started reading in my own bedroom, by myself. Once I got used to that, I found I liked walking to school alone, eating lunch alone, going to the movies alone. Alone, there was nothing to distract me from the only thing I wanted to think about, the only thing in the world that mattered to me.
My sister is gone. My sister is gone. My sister is gone.
One day, my mother knocked on my door holding an envelope in her hand. Thinking it was the letter Annie had promised to send me all those months before, I grabbed it out of her hands and tore it open, slamming the door in her face.
