Oh! You Pretty Things (33 page)

S
cout is staying at Eva's, like they're having an extended slumber party and I'm not invited. Whenever I show up, toting Eva's dry cleaning and giant squishy rectangles of toilet paper and paper towels from Costco, they're holed up in Eva's room with the door dead-bolted and the music blasting.

I stand in the hallway and send Eva short, informational texts:

I brought you guys chai blendeds. Leaving in fridge.

CAA messenger brought your script. Leaving by bed door.

It's both a relief and a disappointment when they go unanswered. I drift through the house like a poltergeist, but instead of upending plants and making the TV go staticky, I clean up dog shit and unpack groceries and salads from Mozza and clear the stacks of plates that Eva and Scout shove into the hallway outside the door.

At night, I sit in my airless apartment and wait for things to change. I call Megan yet again, and after one ring it clicks to a new outgoing message: a long whoosh of traffic noise, then the beep.

“It's Jess,” I say. “I hope your new message doesn't mean you're living in your car.”

I pause, like I'm expecting her to answer me from the vapor.

“You have to believe that I didn't know. And you should be staying here and not under an on-ramp to the 405. Call me. Please. I love you.”

I fall asleep watching a rerun of
The Real Housewives of New Jersey
season recap. Two women in bandage dresses and flat-ironed hair are screaming abuse at each other. Watching this is about the worst thing you can do to your psyche that doesn't involve an illegal act.

F
irst thing in the morning, I listen to a voice mail Eva left at 2:30
A.M.
“I need you to go pick up J's car first thing.” Her voice is muffled, like she's calling from inside a closet stuffed with fur coats. “We left it at Gjelina because I had too much wine. The manager knows you're coming.”

She clicks off without saying good-bye and I roll over and reach for a cigarette, wondering if she's still with him. Wondering why I'm still with her.

The next message is from her too. “When you get J's car, I need a favor,” she says, and now it sounds like she's left the fur closet and is eating an everlasting gobstopper.

I hate that she calls him J. I hate that she stole him from my best friend and it's my fault. I hate that whatever is coming next is
a favor
, whatever the fuck that means. And I hate her habit of leaving me messages while she's eating. Considering she weighs ninety-two pounds, I'm pretty sure she does the bulk of her calorie ingesting while on my personal voice mail.

“Can you grab me an order of the roasted eggplant and olives? I ate it last night and it was legendary. Drop it by set when you're done. In fact, get two. Pax needs to try it.”

Pax is Eva's costar. He just got engaged to a one-named pop star who fronts a multiplatinum band, which suddenly rendered him interesting to Eva, after years of ennui. Plus, he's known for playing the portly, balding sidekick but he recently spent serious coin on a ground-up renovation: hair plugs, laser hair removal, sculpting his doughy body into a ripped leading-man physique, the works. Goody for him.

I light my cigarette and consider the message about JJ, which is like an SAT logic question. If A and B have dinner at Gjelina and A has too much wine, where do A and B go in A's car? To A's house? To B's house? To the Four Seasons? And how does C get from Gjelina to B's house to A on set without cloning herself?

There are two big problems.

One: if I drive to Gjelina, I'll have to leave my car there when I take JJ's to Malibu, where I guess he's now staying. There is no public transportation in Malibu. There's not even a cab company, except for one old surfer dude who only works when there are no waves. I can get a round-trip cab from Santa Monica, but it will cost two hundred dollars. Which isn't a big deal, but Eva will forget why I needed a cab by the time I turn in my expense report, which will turn into another lash of humiliation.

Two: how am I still working for Eva? I don't care if someone abuses me, but she fucked with my best friend. That matters. I've rehearsed my “I quit” speech a dozen times, yet here I am, cleaning up her messes. I can't walk away from her. I can't close the door on Eva Carlton. They're called “stars” for a reason. Once your eyes adjust to the light, how do you go back to the gloom?

I waste a few minutes on a
Parent Trap
daydream, where I get Pax and Eva together, so JJ will return to Megan. Then I roll over and park my cigarette in the ashtray. I'm exhausted and haven't even gotten out of bed yet. I hit Send on Eva's number and before I can settle in against my pillow, she answers.

“Hey,” she says. “I was just about to call you.”

It's 6:45
A.M.
I'm not supposed to be at her house until eleven, because her call time is at two. It's a night shoot at the dilapidated convention center downtown, and shoot days are a pain in the ass. There's always a moment where a cadre of drunk men are catcalling me as I'm lugging food or clothes into the trailer alley that is a mile from where I have to park my car.

“I just got your messages,” I say, then lean into the silence. I'm not really interested in making things easy for Eva right now.

But she's never cared about nuance. I hear her tapping on a keyboard, then she says, “Can you also get me a kale salad?”

I take a drag off my cigarette. “I assume we're still talking about Gjelina.”

She laughs, a hearty laugh that tells me everything I need to know.

I end the call and try to summon the energy necessary to put myself in motion, but my eyes are still closed when the phone rings.

It's Megan.

“Boof!” I fumble to plug in my headset and knock over a half-empty glass of water. “You called!”

I miss the first thing Megan says; there's just her tinny voice coming through the headset speakers. I jam in an earbud and catch the tail end of what she's saying. “. . . my number from that guy across the hall, so they left me a message yesterday, but I just got it.”

“What are you talking about?” I say. “What guy? Where are you?”

“I'm home,” she says.

“JJ's?” I say, my stomach coiling.

“My mother's.”

“I'm so sorry. I fucked up, bad. I—” After weeks of practicing this apology, I'm at a loss. “You . . . You should have come here.”

“Did you hear me? About your mother?”

“My mother?”

“She's in the hospital. She fell down the stairs.”

“Wait, what?”

“It's your mom,” she says with a sorrowful patience in her voice that I've never heard before. “She fell down those janky-ass stairs at our old apartment. They got my number from—what the fuck is that guy's name?—Frankenstein hair and sweatpants.”

“Her boyfriend,” I say. “Rick.”

“Yeah, Rick. You need to call the hospital, honey.”

For the first time, the seriousness hits me. “Did you just call me
honey
?”

“She's in the ICU; she broke some ribs and she's got a . . .” Paper rustles. “Basal skull fracture?”

“She broke her head?”

“Listen,” Megan says. “I'm leaving in fifteen minutes. I'll get to the hospital as fast as I can. I'll hit traffic, but I'll be there, okay?”

“Are you sure it was even a hospital that called you? We're talking about my mother, let's not forget.”

“Oh, Boof,” Megan says, and there's a catch in her voice that makes me realize this isn't just another of Donna's ploys for attention. “Call the hospital, then call me back. I'm throwing my shit in the car right now.”

“Okay, but, Megan?”

“Yeah?”

“I need you to know that I didn't lie about JJ,” I say. “I really didn't know.”

“It doesn't matter, honey.”

“Did you just honey me again?”

“Sorry, Boof,” she says, and we laugh for a second and everything seems almost okay.

T
he hospital is such a typical hospital it feels like a soap opera set, all swimmy blue linoleum and bustling nurses wearing scrubs covered with brightly colored vegetables and fruits. What happens, exactly, when you become a nurse and suddenly want bell peppers and pears all over your clothing? Of course, I'm wearing men's pajama pants and a Pabst Blue Ribbon T-shirt, so it's not like I have a lot of sartorial leeway.

The doctor looks like Mark Ruffalo, with chest hair curling from the top of his V-necked scrubs, five-o'clock shadow, and a beleaguered expression.

He paws his iPad. “Dunne?”

“I'm Jess Dunne,” I say.

“Your relationship to the patient?”

“I'm her daughter.”

He gives me a faded smile. “I see the resemblance.”

“Estranged,” I say.

He looks even more beleaguered. “Then you might not be aware of her DNR.”

“Her what?”

“Her do-not-resuscitate order.”

I shake my head. I know what a DNR is, I just never associated the acronym with my mother, who is more of a KUWS type person: kill using wooden stake.

“Are you sure?” I ask.

“The EMTs found her MedicAlert necklace. It says, and I quote, ‘DNR in my wallet. Yes, you, motherfucker.'”

He clearly finds this amusing. Who wouldn't? My mother can steal the scene even from a hospital bed.

“Why does she have a . . .” I trail off. “She never even gets a runny nose.”

He flips through a couple screens on his tablet. “She gave the DNR order in, uh, Reno. After her diagnosis.”

I have an out-of-body moment where I'm watching myself have this conversation. I see my lips move, but the sound that comes out is vague and distorted. “Her what?”

“It looks like she checked herself out against medical advice from St. Mary's in Reno . . .” He flips through another screen or two. “Five months ago.”

“That doesn't make sense,” I say. “She never told me anything.”

“You'd be surprised at the secrets people keep, even in close-knit families.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I probably would.”

He waits there, watching me like I missed a cue.

“So what's wrong with her?” I finally croak out.

“She has a stage IV anaplastic astrocytoma,” he says.

A row of dormant synapses fire across my brain. Holy shit. She
was
Emily, or, rather, the imaginary Emily was literally her. I'd pegged Emily as a work of fiction, but I completely missed that she was “based on a true story.” That explains Donna's sudden reappearance, all the needy hints on the telephone. Oh, Jesus, and the OxyContin in the Mickey Fine bag. So the weepy scene in Act II where “Emily” moans about not speaking to her “son” . . . wow. If Donna managed to convince herself that she wanted to connect with me, after she'd spent my entire life disconnecting, this is the triumph of her acting career. She's utterly inhabiting her character.

“Can you tell me what that means?” I say, and I'm not at all sure which thing I'm talking about.

His matter-of-fact expression doesn't waver. “In layman's terms, a brain tumor. The medical term is a high-grade glioma, which refers to the star-shaped glial cells surrounding the brain's neurons.”

My mother's
star-shaped
brain cells are killing her? No words.

“She sustained a blow to her head,” he continues. “She fell down a flight of stairs. Maybe the glioma caused a dizzy spell or . . . In any case, we're seeing a lot of intracranial hemorrhage.”

“Can I see her?” I ask.

“As soon as we get her stabilized.”

“That's a tall order,” I mutter, but he's already shuffling away, and I'm grateful he didn't hear me.

I return to the parking lot and curl my back against the warm Santa Anas blowing in from the ocean. I leave messages as the hot air rushes over me like a blanket.

“Boof,” I tell Megan's voice mail, “the doctor looks like Mark Ruffalo and they won't let me see her yet. The whole ‘imaginary Emily' thing was really her. Jesus, she's been dropping hints like a motherfucker and I missed them all. I'm losing it. Where are you?”

Then I call Eva: “I can't deal with the car. I'm at St. John's with my mom. She had an accident and I honestly don't even know what else.”

After my second cigarette, I find my way to the ICU waiting room. I Google “anaplastic astrocytoma,” but it's like looking at hieroglyphics in a Wikipedia format so I set it aside, opting instead to blindly leaf through old copies of
People
and
AARP
and stare at QVC on mute.

I mark time by going to the Nancy Reagan Garden Pavilion to sneak cigarettes. Despite the No Smoking signs, a handful of ICU relatives lurk among the manicured hedges, avoiding eye contact as we surreptitiously puff away.

After my third or fourth trip, Dr. Mark Ruffalo reemerges. His mouth and his words are still out of sync, like a bad print of an old movie. His fingers swipe his iPad and he tells me that the already compromised glial cells are being suffocated by her internal bleeding.

“Can't you—I don't know—drain it or something?” I say.

“We're going to honor her DNR.”

There's a stiff little pause. “So she's dying?”

“Yes,” he says, somberly, “but we're not exactly sure of the timeline.”

“What does that mean?” I don't know what to say. What do people say? “You mean you can't tell me how long? Five minutes? Five days? Five fucking months?”

“There's no way to tell. I expect she'll drift in and out of consciousness for some time, until . . .” His expression lightens in the glow of his touchscreen. “She did ask for you, though. She was quite insistent.”

Gut punch. “What did she say?”

He furrows his brow. “She was a little confused, but she said ‘please bring her' several times.”

Oh
. That makes much more sense. She's not asking for me, she's asking for Eva. I am so not my mother's
her
. This is her dying wish, this is the trump card she wants to play: having Eva Carlton at her deathbed will give my mother a winning hand. Late in the game, but what does that matter? Everything she's done, every twitchy investment she ever made will finally pay off if she dies with a celebrity by her bedside.

“I'm afraid her periods of lucidity will not continue,” Dr. Ruffalo continues. “We're going to get another picture of what's going on in her brain, then someone will bring you to see her.”

“Why do doctors always call everything
pictures
? X-rays, CAT scans, MRIs. Pictures are what you take of your friends doing tequila shots in fucking Ensenada. They're mug shots of the guy who stole your bike.”

He looks at me like I'm the one who needs a radiologic exam.

I take a shaky breath. “Sorry.”

“Are you okay?”

“I don't know,” I say.

“There's no wrong way to feel,” he says.

“You might be surprised,” I tell him.

Dr. Ruffalo makes a sympathetic face, and clicks the button on his iPad so the screen goes black. “I'll have someone come out to update you shortly.”

“Okay,” I say, and he walks away.

Time passes, I don't even know how much, but I'm sitting with an unopened copy of
Martha Stewart Living
in my lap, staring at QVC, when Megan texts.

Boof, I'm parking.

I'm through the automatic doors and halfway to her car before she's even turned off the engine.

“Oh, honey,” she says, folding me into her arms.

“I haven't— I haven't even seen her yet.”

Megan squeezes me tighter.

“I'm so glad you're here,” I say.

“Should we go inside?”

I shake my head. “I've been watching the shopping channel so long, I'm running out of reasons to not order one of those fake ponytails.”

“Oh, man, that's dire.” She pushes me into the driver's seat of her car, then walks around and slides in beside me. “Roll the windows down and let's smoke about it.”

I start to cry. I don't even know what I'm crying about. My mother? Megan? Me? I don't know. But Megan makes comforting noises while I sniffle, until I finally catch my breath.

“I'm going to call Kirk,” I tell her, which, frankly, is news to me.

“What? Now? The plant guy?”

“He came to my house and kissed me.” I tell her the story. “And when all this is done, fuck it. I'm cooking him a meal he'll never forget.”

“Well, good,” she says. “That's a good thing for you to do.”

“Maybe I'll start a ravioli truck.”

Megan nods somberly. “Sure, that follows.”

Her delivery makes me smile. Then she gives me a cigarette and I say, “My mom's in and out of consciousness, but she keeps asking for
her
.”

“For you?”

“For
her
,” I say.

Her face hardens. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“That bitch,” she says.

I hope she means my mother, but I guess it works either way. “Yeah,” I say again.

“Are you going to call her?”

I look at my cigarette, red ember glowing to a half inch of gray ash, which I flick into my open palm and dump out the window. “
She
wants Eva.
I
want you.”

“She's the one dying.”

“One thing about my mother,” I say. “She'll do whatever it takes.”

“Would Eva even come?”

“I don't know,” I say. “Whatever. I'll think about it.”

Then, five minutes after we return to the waiting room, Eva and JJ walk in.