Chapter Fifteen Barb
Chapter Fifteen
Barb
I don’t understand why anyone would want to live along the canals.
Sure, they’re scenic, particularly on a Saturday, when they’re full of water so the docks and boats float rather than lie beached in the sludge-filled basins.
Even with the fishy stench circulating, there’s magic to them.
Yet it’s like living in a diorama. Most of the homeowners leave their blinds open, sometimes their doors, bordering on exhibitionism as they go about their day.
It’s somewhere you live when you want to be envied, when you require external approval.
Perhaps the confusing part is not why anyone would want to live here but why Tessa does.
She seems more confident than that. More private too.
I monitor Tessa’s house from across the canal, standing on a path outside a glass house.
Behind me, the husband, shirtless, watches a soccer game and screams at his wife, the woman I saw with Tessa, that caftan-clad, braless beauty.
From their kitchen, she matches her husband’s shouts with her own, punctuating her threats with a knife as their daughter plays on the floor, immune to the cursing and the threat of violence that surround her.
I don’t mean to listen, but they want me to listen, as though without an audience, their fight, their relationship, wouldn’t be real.
The shades at Tessa’s house are up, although it’s dark and quiet inside, indicating they’ve been open all night. This is not the act of people wishing for privacy. It makes me feel less guilty for spying on her. Rather, for spying on her husband.
The fight behind me is getting louder, more distracting, so I walk down a few yards to a blue-shingled colonial and hide in the shadow of an olive tree while I wait for Tessa and her husband to appear downstairs.
The people who pass me are in varying layers of clothing.
Two women who powerwalk with strollers wear vests and gloves.
A woman with an easel under her arm dons earmuffs with flip-flops.
A man walks his Yorkies in shorts and a fleece jacket.
My bare arms are goose pimpled, and I rub them, debating whether I should go back to the hotel for a jacket.
It’s a damp cold, one that inflames my knee.
When I almost can’t take it anymore, a man slips out the patio door at Tessa’s house, a wet suit dangling around his waist.
This must be her husband. He’s tall and muscular with short hair so dark I can see the white dusting his temples.
He’s handsome. Of course he’s handsome. Tessa’s attractive in the put-together way that suggests she wouldn’t settle for someone less photogenic than she is.
He unlocks a storage shed and grabs a surfboard out of it before heading toward the bridge that will bring him across to my side.
I hunt for somewhere to hide. There’s nowhere to hide along the canals.
Maybe I should start walking. It’s suspicious, standing here, pretending not to watch.
Before I can decide what to do, he’s approaching.
I hold my breath, trying to channel a cloak of invisibility.
He strolls right by without a gaze in my direction.
I don’t need a cloak of invisibility; I already have a natural one.
It’s enough to make me hate him. More than I already do.
I hate him because he’s not the kind of man Regina would like—someone conventionally attractive, married to a woman who wears diamond studs and has no idea her husband is a cheating murderer. The truth jabs at my heart. This is the guy. The rich asshole who lives on the canals. Maisy was right.
I follow him a few blocks to the beach, where he zips up his wet suit and bounds into the water.
I try to keep track of him bobbing on his board.
There are too many surfers weaving in and out of the waves.
I can’t differentiate him from the others, not until he’s jogging out of the water toward a man on the beach who looks Middle Eastern.
Tessa’s husband walks up to him, annoyed.
He stands his surfboard upright in the sand and leans against it as they talk.
The other man gesticulates as he speaks, tugging at his short dark hair.
He has a neatly trimmed beard, leather shoes ill-equipped for the sand.
Tessa’s husband rests a hand on his shoulder, tries to calm him.
The man nods, somewhat appeased, keeps nodding as he walks away.
“Aram,” Tessa’s husband shouts, chasing after him.
They talk for a few more moments, Tessa’s husband again offering him that steady hand on his shoulder along with some counsel.
The other man, Aram, nods again before he trudges away through the uneven sand, climbs into a red Mercedes, and pulls out of a parking spot.
There was something unhinged about this man.
It must’ve unsettled Tessa’s husband, too, because as soon as Aram’s car has disappeared from sight, Tessa’s husband jogs up the beach in the direction of the canals, even though he’s been surfing less than ten minutes.
Again I follow him. Again, he doesn’t notice me.
Back at their house, I monitor them all morning.
I don’t set up an easel to hide behind; I don’t wear binoculars to pretend to be bird-watching.
I’m as obvious as obvious could be, yet no one acknowledges me.
When Tessa and her husband step onto their patio, I hold my breath.
While I don’t want to get caught, I also don’t want to confront the possibility that I’m as invisible to Tessa as I am to her husband.
I walk quickly toward the busy avenue at the end of her canal, peering behind my shoulder to make sure she hasn’t spotted me.
My hip smacks into something. It’s a plastic seat, fastened onto the front of a bike.
“Watch it,” a gruff man says, catching his bike by the child seat before it falls. He’s got a few days’ stubble on his face, dark circles that reveal his fatigue. I mutter a quick apology before stepping out of his way.
When I arrive at the edge of the canals, I look back quickly to see if Tessa and her husband are headed my way.
They push Jasper’s stroller in the opposite direction, which I take as an opportunity to retrace my steps and sneak up to their gate.
Their patio has couches as well as a grill, a small dining table under a tree with a baby swing.
It would be so easy to open the gate and step inside.
“Looking for something?” I spin around to see the woman from the ramshackle house next door glaring at me.
I motion toward the yard. “My grandson would love a swing like that.”
She softens a little at this, making me think she’s a grandmother too.
Not too. I will never be a grandmother. Momentarily, I’m jealous of this lonely woman who has nothing better to do than spy on her neighbors.
As I start to walk away, I wave behind me. “You take care now.”
I round a corner and slip onto another canal, lined with houses similarly on display to the public. Regina’s murder could have happened anywhere along these waterways, but it didn’t. It happened outside Tessa’s home. Her husband’s.
That afternoon, I google the addresses from the handwritten list I found in Regina’s self-help book.
Expo Hall, Downtown Lofts, Rabblerouser’s, Contessa’s, Lollygag, South Sea, Love Self-Tape, Starfish.
About half the meetings have already happened.
The others will unfold without Regina. Lollygag, Contessa’s, and Rabblerouser’s sound like bars.
To my relief, when I locate them, none of the businesses are in the libations industry.
There’s only one Lollygag in LA: Lollygag Studio in Venice.
It’s a rehearsal space where you can rent a room by the hour.
According to her notes, Regina had a meeting there last Tuesday.
My birthday. When we spoke, she was en route to Lollygag.
I drive up Pacific Avenue until I spot the sign for Lollygag Studio, a stand-alone building that looks like a storage facility.
Two cars are parked in the lot. I pull up right out front.
The door’s locked. Inside, the lights are off, and I press my face to the glass, trying to get a glimpse into the dark halls inside.
“Can I help you?” a man lugging a crate of camera equipment says. He puts down the box.
“I’m trying to find information on my daughter. I think she was here last Tuesday.”
He takes a card out of his back pocket and presses it against the pad to unlock the door. “I don’t know who had the space last week. We’re holding auditions next week.”
“Do you know, are there AA meetings here?”
“Not next week, there aren’t.” Deftly, he throws the door open, bends down for the box, then stands, catching the door with his foot before it closes. I could help him, but I don’t offer and he doesn’t ask.
The week before her meeting at Lollygag Studio, she had one listed at someplace called Love Self-Tape.
It’s located in a warehouse in Marina del Rey not far from here, so I head there next.
The complex is divided into tiny self-taping studios, which I learn from the receptionist are where actors record auditions for parts.
“There’s one rehearsal space,” she tells me, glancing at the photo of Regina on my phone. “I’ve been here four years, never seen an AA meeting. If your daughter was here, she was probably auditioning. She’s pretty enough to be an actress.”
An actress? So these weren’t AA meetings?
While that doesn’t mean she relapsed, it feels like a blow, a growing fissure in my story.
She’d always been a writer. Wouldn’t she have told me if she was auditioning?
She must have known that I would try to talk her out of it.
Acting is even more of a crapshoot than writing.
We would have fought. It would have strained our fragile symbiosis.
She was right not to tell me, which is hardly a comfort.
It’s one more notch on the long belt of ways I’ve failed her.
Of course this is when Isaac calls, as the doubt is creeping in, threatening my resolve. I hesitate on the sidewalk outside the self-taping studio, then pick up.
He asks a few benign questions about how I’m doing, never once inquiring if my trip has been fruitful. To him, this is a futile quest of misplaced grief.
“The l’vayah’s tomorrow,” he says. I hate that he calls it a l’vayah instead of a burial, that religion makes his grief profound.
“I’m aware.”
“I know you feel like you need to be in LA. I just don’t want you to regret—I’d hate for you to look back and wish you’d been here.
” His voice is so laden with concern it makes me want to lash out at him for thinking he knows what I need more than I do.
It comes from a good place. Isaac was never a bad man.
He just never understood me. He certainly doesn’t understand me now.
“I appreciate that, but I need to stay and—”
“You’ll be back for some of the shiva, though, right?
” Now he’s begging, like it might break him not to have me there.
It breaks me, too, a cracking through my breastbone.
Even if this burial and shiva aren’t what Regina would have wanted, it’s the only funeral she’ll have. And I’m going to miss it.
“I won’t be able to live with myself if I don’t find out what happened to her,” I explain.
“Let me know when you’re back,” he says gently. I stop myself before I ask why. Isaac and I aren’t friends. We won’t grow closer now that our child, our sole connection, is gone.
“Isaac?” I ask before he hangs up. “Did Regina tell you she was getting into acting?”
“She was a writer.”
“She was auditioning,” I tell him.
“Whatever you say.” There’s an edge to his voice, the first sign that he’s losing his patience, that his sympathy for me is finite. “Take care of yourself, Barb,” he says, like I haven’t been doing that for years.
As I drive back to my hotel, I call Linda.
“Should I come home?” I ask her.
“Are you ready to come home?” she asks me.
“I should be at her burial.”
“What will you regret more, missing her funeral or leaving too soon?”
We both know the answer.
“I’m going to find out what happened to her,” I promise Linda, and Regina, and this impossible, shapeless city.