Chapter 9
Sebastian is trying to throw himself over a high metal bar, his body arching in the unnatural way he has been told to arch it, head back, legs swinging up high.
You have to abandon your intuition, the coach said as he walked the high jumpers through the technique, though really Sebastian has already abandoned it, it was gone the moment he donned the mesh uniform for the Aldwych Midnight Riders—a team name which was meant to invoke Paul Revere, but has been reduced to the orgasmic humiliation of organized sport.
So jump, though it makes no sense, contort yourself into someone you are not.
Watch as Lola runs laps around you. And when the coach is distracted, you can lie on the thick red mats and flirt with girls.
“Bliss, let’s go.”
It’s almost the end of the practice. It has to be.
His brain is leaking pointless information and his body has stretched beyond itself.
It would be nice, wouldn’t it, to go roll up a lumpy joint, hotbox the car, forget all the bullshit everyone has tried to cram into his head today.
The tangle of quadratic equations and neutrons and el subjuntivo.
But no—he promised his dad: he has to try.
Call it a lost bet. Having rejected all extracurriculars beyond “chillin’,” Sebastian explained to his father that none of it mattered; his plan was to become an artist.
And what does that look like? Al had asked.
Sebastian had gestured to himself. His long hair in a greasy bun, his chipped black nail polish.
He didn’t have an answer beyond the feeling inside him.
Being an artist is about living in a certain way.
About seeing as much as making things. Often, Sebastian feels he is watching the world through an alien camera, aware of a complacency that others hide behind.
His father sighed. Seb, you know, very few people get to make a living being an artist. The tough fact of life is that the winners play it safe.
They don’t dick around in study hall, they don’t mess with drugs.
They study hard and show up to extracurriculars, and gradually, through facts, they grow to understand the world.
Bullshit, he said. I understand the world. And with gusto, he threw himself at applications for summer programs, photographed his work from art class, mailed in forms to museums and universities.
Not a single yes. Ironically, what the artist had failed to see clearly was himself.
Sebastian lacked technique. Maybe he lacked talent.
But worst of all, he felt he had disappointed his mother.
In his underwear drawer he collects her: strands of what might be her hair, old bottles of pills, a faded, woven key ring with her initials on it.
A necklace with black stones, a silk scarf.
It’s stupid, an effort to gain access to something: the worlds she was interested in, the way she liked to feel.
His memories are a profusion of finger paintings, confetti cut with novelty scissors.
She was always determined to make something, even if it was only a mess.
Maybe he had mistaken her for a star. Maybe Casey was wrong all those years ago, or humoring them. Maybe she never made it big after all. He began to feel ashamed, using his mother as an excuse for wanting more than the life on offer.
Enough, he thought, of playing the same old part, the fuck-up twin. As bleak as it is, his father might be right.
Slowly he walks to his mark, stretching his arms to the sky, telling himself that this is good for him.
Materially, of course, it has been. Cleaning up his act has invited prizes: an increase in his weekly allowance, muscle on his lanky frame.
More time with Lola, on the field, in the car after practice, around the kitchen table at night doing homework.
Even a new note of recognition in his father’s voice—or if not recognition, tentative relief.
It is almost enough to trick him into thinking he enjoys this.
The fact remains: every fiber of him rebels at the nonsense of jumping, the endless, pointless repetition, the obsession with every gained centimeter.
Last night he spent an hour watching videos of pros online, trying to mesmerize himself into submission.
Their bodies alarmed him, carved out by this bizarre aspiration, their legs overlong, their asses comically flat. Contortion had made them monstrous.
“Come on, kid, let’s see it.”
He exhales. Somehow his body begins to move.
Hop, skip, jog, accelerate, bending knee and twisting and throwing himself into the—shit (fuck!) shrieking pain rippling up his (agh!)—he felt it when he went over, bar clattering into his back, his ankle the new center of his body, his hands clutching it, his back on the edge of the mat, and he can tell even with his eyes shut that Lola—two hundred meters away—is aware of him, is coming.
“Elevate it.” She moves him onto the grass, offering her knee as a surface while the coach calls for ice.
“I twisted it.”
“You were tired.”
Her face, though flushed from hours of exertion, is calm and focused.
Gently, she unties his shoe, slips it as lightly as possible off his foot.
She tilts his heel as though she can feel where it hurts, how far is too far.
Directly she fires off instructions to the group that has surrounded him.
“Get his backpack, the green one. Ask Zoe for an Advil. Tell Coach I have to go.” She wraps gauze around the ice pack that has materialized, studies his face as though it will tell her how much he is broken.
“You’re going to have to drive,” he says.
“I know.”
Last month they pooled their money (mostly hers) to buy a beat-up Corolla, a manual, the interiors so sticky and disintegrating they call it Sugar Baby.
They both refer to it as “their” car, but really it’s Sebastian’s.
He’s the better driver, more at ease with the flow of the road.
Every morning, he ferries them to and from school.
Generally, it’s his favorite part of the day.
They listen to talk radio. The world flows through them, a young Black senator from Chicago, a peace agreement in Darfur.
If the twins share anything it is this: an understanding that the world is an unstable place, that anything can be taken away from you at any time.
She lifts the keys from the front pocket of his backpack and he hops to the car, leaning heavily on her shoulder. She tugs hard at the passenger door while he balances on one foot.
“How long do you think I can play this up for?”
“A week, maybe.”
“Damn. Is that it?”
He turns the radio on and she turns it off. “No distractions.”
“Fine. By the way, it’s been sticking between second and third.”
“I won’t need third.”
Lola reverses like a geriatric, then begins to drive, leaning up close to the wheel, back straight as a board.
“This is honestly the least efficient ambulance I have ever been in.”
“You’ve never been in an ambulance.”
“Exactly.”
“But if you want to, I’ll amputate your damn foot.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Don’t push it, I’ll do it,” she says. “I cut open a sheep eyeball in Bio yesterday.”
The pebbled driveway judders his leg and he moans dramatically.
She opens the door for him, helps him out of the car.
He doesn’t make it past the living room before sinking into an armchair.
Lola fetches the ottoman, sets a pillow under his ankle.
The ice pack has gone warm, and his ankle swells against the gauze.
“We might have a squeezy thingy downstairs,” he says.
“A compression bandage?”
“That’s the one. With all the medical stuff. In the basement.”
He saw it, didn’t he? When he was rooting around a while ago, looking for the Christmas presents that his father claimed were from his mother every year.
It’s where they would be, if they were really from her.
He’d found nothing but junk. Cartons of dusty electrical appliances: old lamps and fans that don’t seem to work, withered baggies of wing nuts and niche-looking metal fixings.
A box of unwrapped medical supplies: bandages and syringes and sanitizers that had failed to save his mother’s life.
Sebastian closes his eyes, listens to Lola’s subterranean rooting.
Pain shoots up his calf. See, I told you, his body seems to say.
This was a bad idea. At least it’s a half-decent excuse for skipping homework tonight.
And skipping practice tomorrow. The week opens up in front of him, unencumbered. Beneath him, a noise.
“What?”
“I can’t find it.”
He heaves himself up, hobbles to the top of the stairs. “It was in a cardboard box.”
“Is it this?”
He scoots down the stairs on his ass, holding his leg out in front of him. The box is large and well packaged, a California address label cut through.
Inside him, something leaps.
“Open it.”
The bandage is forgotten. Together, greedily, they unpack it: two faded sundresses, a broken pair of plastic sunglasses, a crumpled receipt, a dog-eared Danielle Steel novel, a loyalty card for a café in Burbank with four stamps on it, two loose headshots (one smiling, one serious), a folding silver frame holding each of them as infants (one smiling, one serious), a card for a Los Angeles taxi driver, and a thick stack of scripts for Life and Times.
“Holy shit.”
There are dozens of them. There might be a hundred.
Thick, marked-up scripts, a tower of days of her life, her name and thoughts and ideas in fanciful blue fountain pen and yellow highlighter, and My God, this is proof.
She was a real actress. His mind is barely catching up to the implication as he flips through pages hunting for MARGIE LUDLOW.
She is there, entering CUP O’SUNSHINE café.
She is there in the margins, doodling a mug of coffee with steam rising out of it, sweet and distracted and familiar.
What is my intention? she writes, and inside him something swells, threatens to overwhelm him, an overpowering righteousness at having found her.
“She was a star.” Joy like far-off fireworks. With terrible clarity, the universe rearranges itself: his father never wanted him to know the scale of this. “He hid her from us.”
“Who? Dad?” Lola looks pale. “I’m sure there’s a reason.”
“Lola, you can’t be serious.”
Above them, the sound of the front door.
His father’s heavy footsteps. The enemy among their ranks.
Fuck him, Sebastian thinks. He will come back tomorrow.
Think what more there could be! Yes! He did come from somewhere, from someone, from a person who felt and lived the way she wanted.
He knew her, he has always known her, he can know her again.
Awkwardly, he grips the railing, hops back up to the light.
“Are you coming?” he calls to Lola, lingering.
“In a minute,” she says.
Deftly, she had slipped the parcel of images behind her, trying to keep her hands still, not sure she could trust what she’d seen.
Her brother, thumbing through scripts, in thrall of his own revelations, had not noticed their removal, had pawed through the haul as though it was complete.
But now, alone, she retrieves a series of photographs of her mother’s bare body.
The woman in the photos is laughing. Staring sulkily at camera.
Rolling curves of hip and breast, dark hair cascading.
Clavicle and neck. She is wearing nothing but a necklace.
She is wearing nothing at all. She is beautiful and complete but also shocking.
Wrong. There is too much of her. Oh God.
Viola’s stomach, sick with a horrible knowing, with unknowing, with suspicion and wrongdoing, with heritable dirtiness.
Who took these photos? Who were they for?
Did she ever… Was she… What? Unfaithful? Obscene?
Inside her, an origin story fractures. Refuses to reform.