Amen, L.A.

by Cherie Bennett

  There was Chad’s escapade. Should I tell my parents? Should I make Chad tell them? Had he defied my expectations and already told them? If he had, what would happen next?

  There was Sean, the Great Non-Communicator. Why did it have to be after we’d had sex that I realized he might well never be the emotional partner I now longed for? We’d been just fine before. He was reliable. He was steady. He went to church and believed in God. Was it him or me with whom I was unhappy? As I lay against my pillows in the moonlight, I admitted to myself that the latter was a definite possibility.

  There was Brett. One minute I was the focus of his attention, the next he was blowing me off to go party with polluted Alex in Hollywood. Who does that?

  Alex. Thinking about her was the hardest of all. I should have stuck to her like Elmer’s once I knew she was drinking. I figured out why she had left without me: she didn’t really want me clubbing, because she knew I’d bitch at her about alcohol. I had a vision of her just before I fell into a fitful sleep: on a nightclub dance floor, her blouse spinning in one hand overhead, her La Perla bra spinning in the other.

  I had the same vision on waking up; my alarm sounded at eight, since I’d stupidly forgotten to turn it off.

  Even before brushing my teeth, I went to my laptop. I had an email to send—to Sean, letting him know that I wanted to talk with him about his upcoming visit.

  As my laptop booted, I opened the window shades; it was another glorious California.

  Sunday. Church day. Fair enough. I could use it. Two hummingbirds buzzed around the feeder, taking dive-bomb runs at each other, swooping out of the way and then coming back for more. I watched, mesmerized. What would it be like to be one of those birds? To worry only about getting enough nectar in your system to power your fluttering wings, day after day after day? Would it be boring, or just fine? Just fine, I decided. After all, you’d have a brain the size of a pinprick. About the level at which my brain had been operating lately, come to think of it.

  When I went to my email, I saw a message with an attachment waiting for me. From Chad. The text was short.

  Sis—I wasn’t lying about the video. Check it out. Chad

  The attachment was two minutes long. It was of Chad and Lisa in the cabana at Brooke’s party. He hadn’t been lying: it was a tongue-in-cheek, so to speak, instructional video on how to kiss. Lisa offered commentary to the camera about lips, slobbering and the lack thereof, tongue penetration and the lack thereof, and the importance of coming up for air, with Chad occasionally coming into frame. At first he played a rank amateur kisser who didn’t know what he was doing. Once trained by Lisa, he became a champion lip-locker.

  Okay. I had to admit it. It was funny. It would have been even funnier if it hadn’t been my thirteen-year-old-but-looks-sixteen-years-old brother. It wasn’t at all what I’d feared. How would that impact my telling, or my asking Chad to tell, our parents? Hard to say. I’d think about that some more after I wrote the email to Sean.

  Dear Sean,

  It’s me. I’ve been a jerk. I hope you can forgive me. I know it has been hard for us to talk by phone and by Skype. You must feel like I am pushing you to talk more openly with me, because I feel like I’m pushing you, too. I do think that being able to talk openly is our best hope now that we’re a couple of thousand miles apart. But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy. That I’m confused about what happened between us at the lake house hasn’t made things easier. So I hope that when you actually come

  My cell rang. I stopped writing. It was a blocked number.

  “Hello?”

  “Nat?” I didn’t recognize the female voice.

  “Yes, it’s Nat.”

  “It’s Sandra. Did you hear the news?”

  “Oh, hi! Sorry, I didn’t recognize your voice.” I felt a little burst of adrenaline. From the tone of her voice, I could tell that whatever the news was, it wasn’t good. “What news?”

  “Your new best friend, Alex Samuels?”

  “What about her?” My heart pounded against my rib cage.

  “Evidently, she was at a party at Brooke Summers’s house, and then she went clubbing with a bunch of kids. They were all roasted and toasted, which doesn’t surprise me. Anyway, they got into an accident at the corner of Hollywood and Highland. She’s in the hospital. Cedars-Sinai. One other kid is there, too.”

  Oh no.

  “Who’s the other kid?”

  “Brett something-or-other. I don’t know him.” Sandra went on, with a tone of superiority, “Not that I’d want to know him.”

  Brett and Alex. Both in the hospital. Oh no, oh no, oh no.

  “How did you find out?”

  “Tracy McFarlane’s mom is a nurse at Cedars. She called Tracy, and Tracy called me. There’s a story about it on TMZ. I thought you’d want to know.”

  What could I say? “Thanks, Sandra.”

  “Don’t mention it. See you in church later. Bye.”

  She clicked off, which was good, because I was literally speechless. Numbly, I saved the Sean email and went to the TMZ website.

  There it was, on the home page, about halfway down: CLUB KIDS INJURED IN HOLLYWOOD WRECK. The piece was short, only a few paragraphs, but it confirmed what Sandra had reported. Alex was in the hospital, in serious condition. Brett, too, in fair condition.

  Crap.

  I pulled on a Viterbo University sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and a pair of khaki cargo pants and ran downstairs. Fortunately, my sister and brother were still sleeping, so I didn’t have to deal with the Chad thing immediately. But my mom and dad were both in the kitchen. Dad was cooking an omelette breakfast, while my mom was at the table, engrossed in a phone conversation with a congregant. I padded in and went straight for the coffeemaker.

  “Morning, Nat,” my dad greeted me. “Cheese omelette? Or cheese-and-shiitake-’shrooms?”

  “Just coffee, thanks,” I told him as I poured myself a steaming mug. My hands shook so much the coffee sloshed around. I don’t usually drink coffee black, but since that was the color of my mood, it seemed fitting. I sat down across from my mom, who gave me a little wave, then went right back to her call. She was already dressed for church, in a black skirt, a white blouse, and a beige jacket. Stylish, but not too stylish. People don’t like it when their minister looks better than they do.

  “Uh-huh,” my mom said into her cell. “Well, I’m supposed to be at the building by … uh-huh. This takes priority.… Uh-huh … uh-huh … I’ll see you in forty-five minutes. But I can’t stay long. I have a service to run.”

  Forty-five minutes. There was no place in Los Angeles you could get to in less than twenty minutes. Huh. She was out of there. When I told the story, I’d have to talk fast.

  She clicked off. “Congregant emergency. They call; Marsha Shelton answers. The day gets off to a catastrophic start.”

  I sipped my coffee as my father joined us at the table. Maybe he’d told my mom about the night before. Maybe not. I’d find out soon enough. “Alex was in a car accident last night.”

  “Oh no!” my mother exclaimed. She and my father shared a look. “What happened? Your dad told me a little about the party.”

  Very quickly, I sketched out what I knew, leaving out the part about Chad’s being at that party. My mother preferred conversations with a single topic.

  “And it’s my fault,” I concluded, glum. “I shouldn’t have let her out of my sight. I would have been the designated driver. How could I have been so stupid?” Now I was on the verge of tears.

  I saw my mother frown. I don’t like it when my mom frowns.

  “What?” I asked.

  “First of all,” my mother began, “Alex is responsible for Alex’s choices, not you.”

  “But I—”

  “Not you,” she repeated firmly. “I remember sitting with you on the floor not very long ago, talking about Alex, whether you should be her friend or not.”

  “I remember, too.”

  She t
ugged unconsciously at the cuffs of her blouse. “Clearly, you decided it was a good idea.”

  I stared into my coffee. “Yeah. I did.”

  “Any regrets now?”

  I snuck a glance at my dad, but he was letting my mom take the lead. “All kinds of regrets,” I admitted.

  “Do your regrets outweigh the good part of your friendship with her?” My mother’s eyes bored into me.

  Tough question. No. I didn’t think so. Even with her in the hospital.

  “No,” I declared.

  She shook her head and frowned more deeply. “Well, that’s something that I think you’re going to need to reexamine. I’m not telling you what the right answer is. She’s your friend, not mine. You know Alex far better than I do. I can tell you that looking from the outside, I don’t think you have had the kind of influence on her that you hoped.”

  My dad nodded. “You think you could have been the designated driver? You also could have been in the seat next to her.”

  Ouch. I heard what they were saying. It hurt.

  Mom stood. “I’ve got to go. Natalie, we can talk again at church, if you want.”

  I stood, too. “I’m missing church today. I’m going to the hospital. I’m taking the Saturn, if that’s okay.”

  It was unusual to miss church. But it was okay, which tells you something about my mom and dad. I grabbed my bag and the car keys and beat my mother out the door.

  Chapter Twenty

  I was planning to drive straight to Cedars-Sinai, but then I remembered that Alex’s brother, Shepard, was under house arrest, meaning he wouldn’t be permitted even to see his sister. I had mixed feelings about this. I thought that Shepard was lucky to be under house arrest for his drug conviction, instead of in prison. Someone poorer, who couldn’t hire a first-rate lawyer, wouldn’t have the option. So Shepard, except for his naked wanderings into neighbors’ houses and even bedrooms, was basically confined to the world’s ritziest penal facility, namely, the Samuelses’ family manse.

  And yet … what would have been so bad about letting him pay for a police escort so he could see his sister in the hospital? He had to be worried sick, which was exactly why I made a detour to the Samuelses’ front door.

  When I got there, I found a small army of Latino groundskeepers and landscapers, cutting grass, trimming hedges, edging the lawn, blowing leaves, and planting new beds of flowers. These landscaping teams were as ubiquitous to Beverly Hills as the snow was to Mankato.

  When Shepard opened the double French front doors for me, he was freshly shaved and wore a pair of jeans with an aquamarine golf shirt. To my surprise, he’d also cut his hair. Basically, he was barely recognizable as the stoned, naked guy I’d found in my bed.

  “Come in, Nat,” he urged, ushering me inside. There was a small, airy sitting room just beyond the front door, with a glass wall that looked out onto the canyon, and that was where we installed ourselves on a couple of burgundy leather-bound chairs. I saw new worry lines, like quote marks, between his eyebrows.

  “I’ve been on the phone all morning with Cedars-Sinai. She’s in a private room on the sixth floor.” He rubbed his forehead as he talked. “I haven’t told Chloe. But I’m afraid that some other kid at camp will hear about it and start blabbing.”

  “It’s hard to know the right thing to do,” I said sympathetically. “How is Alex?”

  Shepard stood and paced with nervous energy. “She ruptured her spleen. The doctors removed it last night. She’s got contusions on her legs, and possibly a bruised pancreas, which could cause all kinds of problems down the road. Right now, she’s allegedly ‘resting comfortably,’ ” he added bitterly. He smacked one fist into an open palm. “I cannot believe that I have to do all this by phone!”

  “I’m heading over there now. I’ll find out everything I can,” I promised, standing up. A lump rose in my throat. “I’m sorry,” I said softly. “I could have stopped this from happening.”

  He smiled at me with kind eyes. “You think you could have stopped this from happening.”

  “I know I could have,” I insisted. “I promised I’d help her stay sober—”

  “Ha!” he barked, following it with rueful laughter.

  “What’s so funny?”

  He wagged a finger at me. “You. You’re funny. You clearly don’t have a lot of contact with people who end up in rehab.”

  “That’s true,” I admitted. “But—”

  “But nothing. You’re talking to someone who has been in rehab three times, and clearly the third time wasn’t the charm.” To illustrate his point, he tapped one bare foot against the ankle bracelet that let law enforcement monitor his whereabouts every hour of every day. “Now go. Call me when you can, okay?”

  I reached for my purse, which I’d left on the chair, and looped the strap over my shoulder as I stood. “I’ll definitely call you from the hospital—”

  “Oh!” he exclaimed, holding up a palm. “I just thought of something. Wait here.”

  Without giving me a chance to respond, he bounded out of the room. There was nothing I could do but wait, so I turned to the picture window and took in the magnificence of the canyon. A red-tailed hawk was tracing lazy circles across the sky. But honestly, I barely saw it. I was still rethinking the night before. What I had done. What I hadn’t. Mostly what I hadn’t.

  “I do that, too.” I spun back to see Shepard in the doorway, a melancholy smile on his face. “Stare out that window,” he said, cocking his chin toward the glass. I saw he now held a framed photograph and a small white stuffed animal in his hands.

  “Yeah,” was all I managed to say.

  “I have a couple of things that Alexis would probably like in her room,” he explained. “If you wouldn’t mind …” He moved toward me and offered the photograph. “Our mom and dad.”

  I took it. It was a picture of Mr. and Mrs. Samuels in their thirties, on a photographic safari in Africa. They had multiple cameras around their necks, arms around each other, huge smiles on their sunburnt faces. They were obviously in love.

  What a tragedy. What a terrible, terrible tragedy.

  “Yeah,” Shepard said, as if reading my mind. “It pretty much ruined everything there was to ruin. And then some.” He looked down at his other hand and seemed almost surprised to see the stuffed animal. “Ah! And this is Twitch. Alexis always loved Twitch. I don’t think she’s ever slept a night away from him. Even when we travel. This rabbit ought to have a passport.”

  He gave me the bunny. No bigger than eight inches and well worn, it was missing a button eye, and the monofilament whiskers that had obviously once adorned the head had diminished to one thin strand that brushed my forefinger.

  “My dad brought that back for her when she was five, from a business trip.” Shepard smiled at the memory. “I think he brought me a new guitar. The littler the kid, the cheaper the present. But they don’t love it any less.” He thrust his hands into the pockets of his jeans.

  “I wish you could come with me,” I told him.

  “I wish it, too.”

  He turned away and I took that as a cue not to stare. Maybe he was getting ready to cry. Maybe he was crying already.

  “I should go.”

  “Thanks, Nat. Alexis is lucky to have you as a friend.”

  He still didn’t look at me. I said goodbye and found my way out.

  It took me just a half hour to get to Cedars-Sinai, and five minutes more to find a spot in the parking structure. I wished it had taken longer, since I was still trying to figure out what to say to Alex when I saw her. Also, what I’d say to Brett. Because as guilty as I felt about Alex, that was how pissed I was at Brett.

  Cedars-Sinai is a huge hospital. I got lost twice trying to get to the sixth floor, because I didn’t realize that there were multiple sixth floors in multiple buildings. It was only by the process of elimination that I found the one with Alex’s private room. As for Brett, he was being held mostly for observation on the neuropsych floor. His CAT
scan looked fine, but since he’d banged his head, they were watching for signs of a subdural hematoma or a concussion. All this I got from a too-helpful Filipina nurse at the desk who, to my benefit, had only a tenuous grasp on the notion of patient privacy.

  “Alex Samuels?”

  “Room 614, at the end of the corridor,” she told me.

  “Thanks.”

  As I started down the hallway, I took out the photograph and the toy rabbit. I thought Alex might be happy if I came with both these things visible. I’d already decided what my approach would be. Supportive. Kind. I couldn’t reject her for what she’d done, and I wasn’t going to go all heavy on her. Though I don’t believe that the Almighty punishes us for our misdeeds and misjudgments, at least not in obvious ways, it did seem to me that this accident was punishment enough.

  I don’t know why—I do know why: I was incredibly naïve—I figured that because Alex’s parents were dead and her brother was under house arrest, she would have no other visitors on this Sunday morning and I would be able to stroll right into her room. Color me stupid. There was a big cluster of teens in the hallway outside Alex’s room, all of whom I recognized from Brooke’s party.

  So not good, especially when Brooke and Gray peeled off and stepped toward me when I was maybe twenty feet from the door. As they approached, I wondered why Gray was here. Wasn’t he jetting off to Hawaii or something?

  “Hi,” he offered without enthusiasm.

  Brooke offered no greeting. Instead, she stared at me as if I was dripping raw sewage.

  Fine. I would ignore her. I kept my eyes on Gray. “I thought you were going to Hawaii.”

  “If you haven’t heard, my friends were in a car accident. I changed my plans.”

  I nodded. “How’s Alex?”

  He shrugged. “Jacked up, but she’ll live.”

  “I want to see her,” I declared.

  He shook his head. “Bad idea.”