Chapter 24
Chapter 24
Lolly is pretending that I’m not sitting across from her at the table. She’s spent all evening making small talk with Wallace’s father. His name is Rudy, and he looks nothing like Wallace. But he’s a sweetheart like him and has a beautiful voice.
Before dinner, Uncle Sylvester played the piano, and Rudy sang “Angels We Have Heard on High,” hitting all the high notes like an opera singer.
I caught Taylor and Luna laughing at his vibrato and had to cover my mouth so no one would see me laughing, too.
Austin has texted me three times. I don’t think things are going well with him and his stepmother. But in a way, I’m relieved he didn’t come. I haven’t had a lot of time to myself since I left the hospital, and the six-hour drive was a nice break. Just me alone with my thoughts.
“The meal is amazing, Wallace.” He’s outdone himself.
The turkey looks like something out of a Julia Child cookbook, perfectly browned skin and cut in perfectly proportioned slices. There’s at least a dozen sides, including homemade cranberry sauce with orange slices. Mom used to serve it from a can in one round block with the ridges still on it. After Mom, and before Wallace, Uncle Sylvester used to take us to the W Hotel.
“Before we dig in, I want to propose a special toast to my niece, Chelsea.” Uncle Sylvester raises his glass. “All I can say is thank God you’re here.” He chokes up before he can finish, and then in a last-ditch effort, concludes with, “Don’t ever leave us again.”
There’s not a dry eye in the house, except, of course, for Lolly’s.
Still, the evening is fantastic, the best Christmas I can remember in a long time. Uncle Sylvester is so at ease, so comfortable, which I attribute to Wallace, who makes everyone comfortable. And Taylor and Luna regale the table with funny stories about the screenplay they’re writing. It’s about a flea named Fly, who travels to Dubai on the back of a Weimaraner that’s just won Best in Show at Westminster.
It sounds like a pretty original idea to me, and I wonder how they thought of it. I glance sideways at Lolly, but she’s looking at her phone.
We spend the rest of the evening opening gifts and singing more carols around the piano. Rudy does a version of “Silent Night” that blows me away. And the kids insist on “Jingle Bells,” which we all join in on.
I make my way around the room to Lolly’s side, hoping that I can force her into a conversation. Or at least a few cordial words. Just something to open the doors of communication. But as soon as I inch closer, she heads toward the bathroom. I know it’s a ploy to ditch me, but what am I supposed to do? Follow her into the loo and make a scene?
I linger in the hallway, waiting for her to come out, but Wallace asks me to help set the table for pie. And after dessert, Lolly announces that it’s time for them to leave. Rudy takes her cue and packs up his gifts, and they all walk out together. It’s just Uncle Sylvester, Wallace, and me.
I help clear the last of the dessert dishes, and the three of us clean the kitchen until it shines. Then we gather up all the torn wrapping paper and boxes and load it into a giant garbage bag, which Uncle Sylvester throws down the trash chute at the end of the hallway. It’s only ten, but I can barely keep my eyes open.
When I turn in for bed, I see that I have two missed calls from Austin. I should call him, wish him a Merry Christmas. But I roll over and go to sleep.
The next morning, I shower, dress, and drive to Malibu.
Interstate 10 to Santa Monica is a zoo, a complete madhouse. You would think everyone would stay home the day after Christmas and play with their new toys. But apparently, everyone is headed to the beach. It’s not even a good day for it. Windy and overcast. Though it’ll likely burn off by late morning and turn out to be a beautiful day, as is usually the case in Southern California.
As soon as I’m on the Pacific Coast Highway, traffic starts to move again. It’s one of the great mysteries of the world why everything comes to an abrupt halt and then, without reason, starts up again.
I’ve only been to Lolly’s house a few times and hope I can remember how to get there. After a few false starts, I plug her address into my phone and let my GPS take me there. I should’ve done that in the first place, but I let my arrogance get the better of me.
She’s not expecting me, and I have no idea if she’ll even be home. The kids are with Brent today. I know this because I overheard her bitching to Uncle Sylvester about how the schedule screwed up any chances of her spending the rest of the week at their condo in Hawaii. Poor, poor, Lolly, so deprived.
I’ve forgotten how gorgeous Lolly’s house is until I drive up her long, bougainvillea-lined driveway, and it takes my breath away. It’s a 1920s Spanish colonial with a Saltillo tiled courtyard and an impressive fountain. The house is perched high enough on a hill and angled in such a way that there’s a 180-degree unobstructed view of the Pacific Ocean.
I cut the engine and just stare at it for a while. She got the house in the divorce, because both she and Brent agreed that they shouldn’t uproot the children. Otherwise, Lolly could never have afforded a home like this, even with her astronomical spousal support.
Brent is a Hollywood heavy hitter, who owns his own production and syndication company and is credited with launching The Ellen DeGeneres Show and distributing some of the top game shows on television, including Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy . Lolly met him through Uncle Sylvester.
I get out of the car and walk through the lovely courtyard to get to the double-arched front doors that remind me of a medieval castle and ring the bell. Lolly’s car is in the driveway. But no one answers, so I ring it again. It’s a large house. Who knows if she can hear the ring if she’s upstairs or in the kitchen?
I wait a few more minutes, then walk around to the back, where I find Lolly doing yoga by the pool. She doesn’t seem surprised to see me, yet she doesn’t acknowledge me, either. She just continues with her routine. In a pair of yoga pants and an exercise bra, my sister is in excellent shape. Then again, she has a lot of free time to work out.
The pool is a sparkling blue with an infinity edge that gives the illusion that the water is spilling over the edge into the ocean. I assume it’s heated and gets used year-round. To check, I dip my hand in. It’s about eighty degrees. I can only imagine the gas and electric bill. Just the thought of all those zeros makes me queasy. Another thing Brent is likely paying for.
I plop down into one of the lounge chairs, which is shaded by a giant umbrella. The sun is already peeking out from behind the clouds, and it’s warmer than when I left Century City. The smell of chlorine is thick, and somewhere in the distance, a leaf blower or weed whacker rents the air. Still, it’s peaceful here. Like a private resort above the beach.
I don’t know why Lolly needs Hawaii.
She’s winding down, I can tell, because she’s sitting with the palms of her hands pressed together in front of her sternum in prayer position, her eyes closed, and her head bowed. I’ve taken enough yoga classes to recognize Anjali Mudra. That’s about all I remember from the instruction, probably because it was my favorite point in the routine. In other words, over.
She sits there for a few minutes with her eyes closed, pretending to meditate. Or maybe she really is. But I doubt it. That’s okay, because I’m feeling patient today.
“You look awful.” It’s the first words out of her mouth.
I look the same way I always do. Though perhaps a little thinner, because I haven’t yet gained back my pre-accident weight. But I’m well on my way, considering my three helpings of potatoes and pie last night. I’m already thinking about having another slice of the pecan as soon as I get back to Uncle Sylvester’s.
“I’m serious,” she says. “You look like a bag of shit.”
“That’s lovely, Lolly. What a great thing to say to me after I almost died.” I’m not above playing the death card when it comes to her.
“I’m just being honest.”
“Well, you don’t look so great, either,” I lie.
“I look the best I’ve ever looked in my life. But you, on the other hand, look like a sad sack. Like that bitch, Mrs. Roberts, who used to yell at us for being too loud when she was trying to watch her programs.” She accentuates the word programs , and I laugh.
Mrs. Roberts lived one floor down from Uncle Sylvester and was forever complaining that our footsteps were like a pack of elephants. No amount of rugs was ever good enough for her. She eventually died of a heart attack, and a young couple bought the apartment.
“Whatever, Lolly. Go ahead and get all the anger out of your system.”
“Don’t pull your psych shit on me. I’m not in the mood.”
“I can see that.” I shake my head. “You’re in the mood to excoriate me. So have at it.”
She gets up from her yoga mat in one fluid motion. It’s graceful and at the same time aggressive. “I need a shower.”
She leaves me sitting there while she goes inside the house. Despite not being invited, I tag along behind her and wind up in the kitchen. Five of my kitchens can fit in this room. The La Cornue stove alone would take up most of the floor space in my apartment.
I rummage through her built-in refrigerator for something to drink and help myself to a glass of orange juice. Then wait. I’m not going home until we do this, until we hash this out. I don’t expect that it’ll only take this once, but we have to start somewhere, right?
I pass the time snooping around her house. It’s a long way from our humble beginnings at Porter Ranch, though I have no right to complain. While I don’t have anything like this, I’m well taken care of.
“Stop pawing my furniture.” Lolly sweeps down the wrought-iron staircase. “Why are you still here?”
“Can you just give it a rest already? All this feigned anger has got to be exhausting.”
She surprises me by suppressing a laugh. “What makes you think it’s feigned?”
“Because you’re a very bad actress.”
“Use a coaster.” She points to the juice glass that I’ve put down on the mammoth wooden coffee table in her front room. “It’ll leave a ring.”
“Sorry,” I say, and quickly pick up the glass. “Can we go in the kitchen?” I like that room the best. Even though it’s ginormous, and the state-of-the-art appliances intimidate me, there’s love there. I can feel it oozing from the walls.
She leads the way, motioning for me to take a seat at the breakfast bar. “What happened at Big Al’s? Did he tell you to leave?”
“He’s remarried now. Her name is Barbara, and she loves him more than he loves her.”
“How do you know? Did he tell you that?”
“He didn’t have to; I could tell.”
“Because you’re psychic.”
“Fuck you, Lolly.”
This time, she really does laugh. “How was he?”
“Good. He has a nice house that backs onto a golf course and two stepkids and three grandkids. He seemed very content.”
“Content?” she hitches a brow. “He wasn’t angry that you just showed up unannounced, like the great white hope?”
I shrug. “He appeared genuinely happy to see me.”
“Did he talk about Dad?”
“Yes, we talked about Dad. He says he made peace with . . . what he did.”
Lolly doesn’t say anything, just stares down at her manicured fingernails. “Why didn’t he ever talk to us again?”
“He said he was grieving, that it was too difficult, but that he’s sorry.”
She snorts. “I guess his grief was more important than ours. What an asshole.”
“Things aren’t always black or white, Lolly. It was a terrible loss for him, too. He probably just didn’t know what to say to us, how to react.”
“What happened to Gloria?”
“He said last he heard, she’d married a chiropractor and moved to Tucson. That’s all he knew.”
“Weird.”
I look at Lolly as if to say, What’s so weird about it?
“Dad fucks her, blows Mom’s heart out, then swallows his own gun, and she moves to Tucson. Don’t you see the inequity in that?”
“I guess I never really thought of it that way. All my anger has been directed at Dad, not Gloria. What? You wanted her to die, too?”
“No, of course not. You’re missing the point.”
“What’s the point then? Explain it to me.”
“The point is that . . . oh, never mind.” She waves me off, like I’m too stupid to understand.
I don’t let it bother me, because frankly, I don’t think Lolly even knows what she means. She’s just angry. At me, at our parents, at the world.
“So while I was at Al’s, he showed me this photo album he’s kept all this time. It had pictures of you and me, Mom and Dad, and even Gloria. But there was one of this guy, Jim Toomey. Do you remember him?”
“No. Who is he?”
“He worked with Dad and Al at LAPD and died of a stroke. And this is the freaky part, he was in my dream when I was in the coma. He pulled me over for a DUI, made me take a sobriety test, then let me go with a stern warning. At the end, he told me to say hi to Dad, which even in my dream I found strange. Because how did he even know Dad? And if he did, he must’ve known he was dead.” I look at Lolly to see if she’s following me. “Do you see what I’m saying? It’s as if he was telling me I would be seeing Dad because I was dead, too.”
“Maybe you were and then by some miracle, you pulled through?”
“Do you really believe that?”
“No. I was there, Chelsea. You were in bad shape. Very bad shape. But you weren’t at death’s door.”
“That’s what Austin says. He says I would’ve coded if I died, even if it was only for a few seconds.”
“It was just a stupid dream,” Lolly says.
“But . . . Jim Toomey. I don’t think I ever saw him before, and yet, in my dream, he looked exactly like the picture.”
“You just forgot about him. It was a long time ago.”
“Could be. I’ll be honest with you, though, it’s sort of shaken me. It’s made me rethink everything.”
“Like what?”
“Like the entire trajectory of my life.”
“Is that why you’re here? To make up for what a shitty sister you’ve been.”
“Partially. You know you were in my dream, too? You came to my lake cabin, and we went to the annual Halloween parade together.” I pause for a reaction, but Lolly is poker-faced. “It was nice, you and me spending time together.”
“Hmm, that’s funny. Apparently, I’m not fun in real life.”
“You used to be,” I say, but regret it. It was mean, and I’m here to patch us up, not out-cynical her.
“When? When I was twelve?”
The age is a thinly veiled cut. When she was twelve, I left for boarding school, in essence leaving her. “Let’s not dance around, Lolly, let’s just get it out in the open.”
“What would you like to get out in the open?”
“Us.” I wave my hand between us. “Why we don’t work anymore. Because I would like us to. I miss you.”
She pulls a bottle of pinot grigio from the refrigerator, pops the cork, and pours us each a glass. “Is this part of the new trajectory?”
“Perhaps. But even before the accident, I wanted to fix it. Fix us. I wanted to say I was sorry for leaving you when you needed me most.”
“And when was that?” It’s still there, that sting in her voice. The anger.
“When we were kids. I didn’t mean to abandon you, Lolly. But . . . and this is the hard part . . . I think I was going a little crazy. I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I heard it. The gunshots. The moment Mom and Dad died. I got to the point where I thought there was something in the bed with me. The mattress would shake like there was an animal inside the coils and springs, running back and forth, as if it was trying to get out. I told Uncle Sylvester, and he took the whole bed apart while I watched. ‘There’s nothing here, Chelsea. See?’—he showed me. And then it happened at school. I was sitting on a wooden chair. At first, I thought we were having an earthquake. But when I looked around, nothing was moving. And that’s when I realized it was me. I was the one shaking. My entire body was vibrating. And the only way to escape was to run. I ran as fast and as far as a fifteen-year-old could go. Santa Barbara. Boarding school.”
“So basically, you’re the kid version of Big Al.”
Clearly, my story hasn’t moved her.
“Yes,” I admit. “I was the kid version of Big Al. We all have ways of taking care of ourselves. Ours, Al’s and mine, was to run. And you got left behind. And for that, I’m eternally sorry.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” She peers at me with slatted eyes. “This isn’t about what happened two decades ago, though I’m still pissed about that. I’m still angry that you left me here alone. But I’m not so selfish that I don’t understand why. But this is about what happened three years ago.”
I rack my brain to remember what happened three years ago, afraid that I’m missing something significant, and that if I admit I don’t know what she’s talking about, it will only infuriate her more.
“You have no freaking idea what I’m talking about, do you?” she says, and throws back half her glass of Pinot Grigio.
And then it comes to me. “Your divorce.” But I say it more as a question than a statement, because I’m confused.
“You’re a real piece of work, Chelsea. You know that?”
I want to say, What did I do wrong? Because I honestly have no idea.
“You divorced Brent.” This time, I say it firmly, no wavering. I leave out that we knew she would. Brent is nearly thirty years older than Lolly. It doesn’t take a psychology degree to know he was a replacement for Dad, and that it was only a matter of time before she realized she’d married him for all the wrong reasons.
“No one blames you, Lolly.”
“Don’t you get it? He divorced me. He left me for someone else. He’s probably the only man in the entertainment industry who left his wife for an older woman. She’s not even attractive.” She tops off her glass with the bottle, and her hand is shaking. “I loved him. Do you understand that? I loved him, and he left me.”
I’m speechless. “I didn’t know that,” I manage to say after a few minutes of absorbing what she just told me. “I’d always figured that you left him.”
“You know why you didn’t know he was the one who wanted a divorce? You know why? Because you didn’t fucking ask. You jetted off to Boston or Memphis or Timbuktu, or wherever you go to help people you don’t know to save their marriages. Yet you couldn’t be bothered with mine. Or me.”
“That’s not true.” But the thing is, it is. Everything she’s said.
I try to remember three years ago. I try to remember where I was and what I was doing when Lolly told me she and Brent were breaking up. And nothing stands out. I have absolutely no recollection of us having any kind of momentous talk about it. Sure, there were conversations, snippets about custody of the children, who got what, where Brent would live. The logistics.
But nothing about why .
I’d always assumed it was Lolly who’d precipitated the dissolution of their marriage. That she’d married Brent for security and children. I suppose I never gave their divorce much weight because I never took their marriage seriously.
“Tell me what happened.”
“There’s nothing to tell. He met someone else. Someone who was his intellectual equivalent”—she makes quotes in the air with her fingers—“someone who knows the lyrics to Beatles songs. He actually said that; can you believe it? He said he loved her in a way he could never love me. And then he left.”
“I’m so sorry, Lolly. I had no idea.”
“That might’ve been the worst part.” She puts her glass down and locks eyes with me. “It was happening all over again. Mom and Dad dying, you leaving to go away to school, Uncle Sylvester always working. If it weren’t for the kids, I’d be completely alone.”
“You’re not alone. You’ve got me. I know it hasn’t seemed like that, but it’s going to be different now.”
“I loved him, Chelsea. I know it’s hard for you to see that, but I loved him. I still love him.” She crumples in my arms, sobbing.
I brush her hair with my hand like I used to do in that first year after Mom and Dad were gone. She would crawl into bed with me and cry, afraid that she was forgetting what they looked like, how they smelled, their voices. There was a box under my bed with their pictures, and we’d try to make out their faces in the dark. We’d try to inhale the lingering scent of them, even though it had already faded.
“It hurts so much,” she says between her hiccupping sobs. “It’s like a hole in my heart that never heals.”
“It will,” I say. “With time, it’ll get better.”
“But it’s already been three years.” She pulls away, and I instantly feel bereft of her weight, of her warmth. Of our impossible history together.
“I don’t think you can measure grief in terms of years. I meant time in the abstract.”
“Can you just speak English, please?”
“What I’m trying to say is that it won’t hurt this way forever. You’ll move past it. Maybe you’ll fall in love again, maybe you won’t. But you’ll find something in your life that fills the hole. Something wonderful.”
“How can you be so sure? There’s no guarantee. For all you know, I’ll die a shriveled-up old lady with a broken heart. Taylor and Luna will have to send me away to a special home for sad, pathetic people.”
“Now you’re just being dramatic.”
“Seriously, though, how do you know?”
It’s the old crystal ball question. I remember something Knox told me in my dream about how in the long run, it wasn’t Sienna he wanted, it was the picture of the life he thought she represented. Those words come back to me every time I’m with Austin. And I have to question if it’s the same with Lolly and Brent. If he’s merely a picture of the life she wants.
“No one knows anything for sure,” I say. “But let me ask you something. Do you want to be happy and live your best life?”
“My best life?” She rolls her eyes. “You’re an idiot. But yes, I want to be happy.”
“Then let’s make that your goal for the new year.”
“Just like that.” She snaps her fingers. “A New Year’s resolution to be happy. Poof. It’s that easy.”
“I never said it was easy. In my experience, anything worth having is really, really hard.”
My mind turns to the ridiculous mockups for the Chelsea Knight inspirational calendar sitting on my desk in San Francisco. The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is throw them in the trash.
“But I can help,” I continue. “We can help each other.”
“You don’t have the greatest track record, Chels. You and Big Al are the cut-and-run brigade.”
I let out a long breath. “Not anymore. No more running.” I lean over and take her hand. “Will you do something with me tomorrow?”
“Probably not. What is it?”
“Mom and Dad’s graves. I think it’s time we said a proper goodbye.”