4. This City Bled for Its Water and Sometimes so Do I #2
“Jackpot,” he voiced aloud in a moment of kismet. “Get in with her, you get in with him. Trust me. Just don’t get in too deep with her. If you want to be taken seriously in this town, you don’t want to risk any ill will by close association with her.”
True, she had elements of social liability. The smell, for one thing. The vague sense that she wasn’t entirely present. “Dude. Of course.”
“Dude, of course,” Dan echoed with a laugh, doing his usual thing where he took pleasure in our generational divide.
I didn’t enjoy the times he mimicked me back to me, but he was a good agent.
He was good at his job, and all I needed him for was his job.
“Okay, so you good, kid? I’ll let you know when I’ve got something for y—”
The call cut out, which happened sometimes.
My phone wasn’t great, and my car was even worse.
The air conditioning was on its last legs, the backs of my thighs were plastered to the seat, and I was taking a ridiculous route home as a favor to my dead grandma.
My hands hurt from clutching the steering wheel, my knuckles almost skeletally white.
The wind outside was unrelenting, nearly gusting me out of my lane.
Could I Survive It?
With the sun going down it was hard to tell. For a while I’d been gridlocked on Franklin, now I was winding through indistinguishable canyon streets, my GPS cutting out more frequently the higher I climbed. I felt close to the edge, manic with heat and disappointment.
I’d had another argument with my mother, this time over the job. “So, you’re going to be some white woman’s maid? That’s better than helping your family?”
“She can get me a part in a film, Mom, which last I checked you can’t—”
“I’m drowning here, hija, the least you can do is try to be present—”
“You wanted this job, Mom! I never agreed to it!”
“No, of course not. You wasted a year of tuition at Chapman, now you’re busy wasting your life with boys and parties and drugs for all I know—”
“That’s what you think I’m doing? Just fucking around, wasting my life? Is that what you think this is?”
She let her hands fall in exasperation. “What else are you doing, anak?”
That she could use a pet name while telling me what a disappointment I was made me somehow even angrier.
An idea implanted in my head: I’m leaving.
Whatever it takes, whatever it costs, I’m going to make it.
I’m getting out. (Out of what? Later I would ask myself this.
Out of a home where I was loved even if I wasn’t understood.
Out of the need to live defensively, performing for the audience in my head as well as the one outside of it.)
I was ready to give up on everything when the de Witts’ private drive finally came into view, exactly as Emmanuelle had described it to me in her email.
The drive in from the main road gets very steep and narrow—COULD I SURVIVE IT?
my head shrieked as I drove at what seemed like a forty-five-degree angle downhill without a guard rail—but don’t worry, you’ll be fine.
Code is ####. Daytime staff will be clearing out when you leave or maybe gone already, should be plenty of space to park.
She followed it up with a couple of kisses, xx, like a British socialite.
The villa was down below the road, built into the side of the hill.
I couldn’t see it at all as I drove in, not until the shockingly steep drop, and even then I could discern very little in specific.
I squinted into the shadows of the canyons, looking for the carport Emmanuelle had told me about.
From this high in the hills, I could see the Griffith Observatory; the city was laid out beneath me, a twinkling sprawl underfoot.
A horseshoe drive materialized before what looked like the front of the house, but I’d been instructed to head for the garage, keeping on the narrow road that left little space between my car and my perilous doom.
Now that I was off the main road, I could tell the house was massive and unmissable.
It was primarily a white-washed limestone built into the cliffside, with multiple terraced balconies and several architectural turrets; it seemed to crawl gradually down the edge of the hill, making a slow escape into the abyss.
The terraced patios, which were clearly the prime feature of the house, were all sunbaked terracotta, possibly brick, with a mix of artisanal painted tiles.
Vines crawled up the pillars, over the rooftops.
There was a pool, possibly more than one, and a massive fountain.
Without thinking I began to ponder the water bill, as if my mother’s entrepreneurial spirit had taken sudden control of my head.
I pondered the insurance on a place like this—god, I could hardly conceive of it.
Fire, definitely. I’d passed a fire warning sign on the way in, its arrow pointing red like a harbinger of doom.
Earthquakes certainly, maybe even floods …
I doubted there was proper drainage when it rained.
The signal on my phone, which sat uncharacteristically lifeless in the cupholder beside my seat, was nonexistent.
The email pulled up on the screen from Emmanuelle had come to me through Teddy, somewhat awkwardly. He had also messaged separately to ask if I could be free for a drink, to which I said only if our overlords allow it.
He sent me back a crying emoji, which didn’t exactly bode well.
Also included in Emmanuelle’s email was an NDA, which I signed.
Rich people. No surprise, considering there was almost nothing about her on the internet.
She’d also noted that social media use was restricted in the house.
Okay, fine. She’d included a screenshot of the property on a map, circling the place she wanted me to park at the bottom of the narrow drive, a landing next to the house’s aging garage.
A service entrance, as far as I understood it.
I parked the car and got out, surveying as much as I could without appearing to survey too closely.
The landing was situated below the house’s front entrance but above what seemed to be the primary courtyard, resting on what was functionally stage left.
There was a pathway leading from here to the house’s entry level, moss and clover growing between partially crumbled bricks.
Most of the house looked new—I recalled Emmanuelle’s stress over renovation, which I empathized with to an extent, given the state of my mother’s apartment building—but this part of the house, unseen by visitors, was obviously original.
I wouldn’t say it was in disrepair, exactly. But it had a similar smell to Emmanuelle’s—something just on the edge of ripe, or immaterially alive. Then a gust of wind blew, and I thought I smelled ash. I sneezed.
I paused just before reaching the house, noticing as I traversed the path that there was something below me, nestled in what might have otherwise been indiscriminate hillside flora.
There was a greenhouse structure or something, beside which was a water installation, and another fountain, this one the size of a small pool.
It seemed abandoned, almost wild. A murky slime of algae frothed across the shallow pool of water, which had sunk well below its fill line.
I couldn’t have said what was so strange about this part of the house, just that it seemed very different from the rest of the villa, which was polished to gleaming in everything that could be seen from any other point on the lot.
“Miss Morris?”
A sharp voice snapped me out of my reverie, sluicing through my thoughts. Genesis will meet you at the side door, Emmanuelle had told me.
“Hi,” I said, breathless as if I’d been caught stealing.
Genesis was white in a European way, something I could only guess at anecdotally from the immigrant pockets I’d grown up around.
She was wearing a breezy outfit, all light linens.
Her honey-blond hair was pulled back with a perfunctory air and I tried to smile at her like, Rich people, huh?
“You’re late,” she said, so it hadn’t worked. If Emmanuelle had told her I was a New York Morris—I’d looked that up, too; apparently a Morris signed the Constitution, so old money was involved—I suppose I couldn’t have expected it to.
“I know, I’m sorry, I got a little lost in the hills—”
“People will be arriving soon.”
“Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize—” I’d thought this was an interview. I’d learn shortly I was wrong.
By then Genesis had already started walking. I followed, though I paused once to glance up, taking in a fresh view of the house.
Something materialized in the window above, beside a Juliet balcony. I felt it again, the wash of a wave. For a moment it was cool, a sudden dousing. I shivered, like a chill.
“In here,” said Genesis, which clearly meant get moving. When I looked up again, I saw nothing. Nothing unusual, anyway. Just an open window, an empty room.
White curtains blew from the inside. The flutter of an open eye, watching. I felt it then, a sudden sharpness. Like nails biting into my shoulder.
You have a devil on your back, Tita Linda told me.
I shook it off and went inside.