Seeing Stars (22 page)

Helene fixed her small, bright eyes on Ruth. “I don’t know why. You know what he’s been living on since you left him? He’s been living on macaroni and cheese—the kind that comes in a box and gives you a heart attack.”

“I didn’t leave him,” said Ruth.

“I eat other things,” said Hugh.

“What? That spaghetti you fix, with the sauce that you don’t drain the grease off of? That’s good for you?”

“Eggs,” Hugh said. “I scramble eggs.”

“Well, you could eat an apple.”

“I’ve eaten an apple.”

Ruth thought she might scream.

“Anyway, that’s not the point,” said Hugh.

“I didn’t leave him,” said Ruth.

“I’ll make you some soup,” Helene said. “When she leaves again, I’ll make you some chicken soup with spaetzle. You like that.” She held up her hand imperiously. “White meat only. Who couldn’t lose a pound or two?”

“All right, Mom,” Hugh said.

“So you tell that to Manny Kalman. Tell him from now on, your mother who loves you will feed you.”

T
HE CREEPY THING ABOUT HIS LIFE NOW WAS THAT
H
UGH
was navigating a grotesque and never-ending obstacle course. Test himself too infrequently or fail to keep his numbers in the acceptable range and he would find himself bucketing down the road toward maiming, organ failure, and death. Keep it under control—
if
he could keep it under control, which Manny had told him could be extremely challenging—and he got to stick around. What kind of purgatory was that?

Not that he had any intention of revealing these musings to Ruth. After they’d left Helene’s condo they’d gone to see Manny together and had had nearly an hour’s orientation about Hugh’s new diet and exercise regimen, as well as a practicum for Hugh on how to test himself with a meter and what to make of the results. The finger-stick hurt, the meter was unnerving, and its results were tyrannical: bad numbers, bad man.

Ruth insisted on buying an expensive digital bathroom scale at the Sharper Image, and then loaded the cupboards with entire product lines of sugar-free foods, all of which tasted like crap. She was worried about him, he knew, but she was also fretting about Bethany down in LA. He was horrified that Ruth had left her down there with Mimi Roberts, but on the ride home from the airport she’d made it very clear that the decision was not up for discussion. “I’m not going to talk about it,” she’d said. “Bethy has some important auditions coming up, and she needs to be there for them. So leave it and let’s deal with this.”
This
, of course, being his diabetes, which, she implied, he had obviously brought upon himself.

He missed his wife. This woman was no one he knew, and certainly no one he would have married if he’d met her today for the first time.

Chapter Thirteen

A
S SOON AS
H
UGH AND
R
UTH HAD GONE TO BED, THE PHONE
rang. Ruth, who never slept well when Bethany was out of the house, sat up and grabbed the receiver before the second ring.

“Mom?” Bethy’s voice was high and shrill.

“What’s the matter, honey?” She could hear Bethy breathing shallowly. “Bethy? What’s the matter? Honey, slow yourself down—you’re going to hyperventilate.”

“We just heard like a really loud bang out by the garage and we’re scared,” Bethy said. In the background, Ruth could hear Allison say, “I think it’s moving! I think it’s coming around the front!”

Bethany gave a little shriek. “We’re really really scared. We think there might be a burglar or something, or an Armenian. Allison says that sometimes Armenians sneak around and look in your window to decide if they’re going to rob you or something.”

“Where’s Mimi?” Ruth said, peering at the clock on her nightstand. “Isn’t Mimi there? It’s almost ten thirty.”

“We don’t know where she is.” Ruth could hear Allison saying something, but she couldn’t make out the words. Bethy began to moan, and Ruth could hear her teeth chattering. The child had never had a level head when it came to a crisis.

“Honey, let me talk to Allison. Okay? Bethy? Put Allison on the phone.”

Ruth could hear Bethy saying, “No, she wants to talk to
you
.”

“Hello?” Allison said casually.

“What on earth is going on there? What do you mean it might be an Armenian?”

“We heard a noise,” Allison said. “This, like,
thump
. It was right outside the front door.”

“And?”

“Well, I mean,
I’m
okay, but Bethy’s kind of freaking out.”

“Do you know where Mimi is?”

“Work, probably. She went back after she dropped us off.”

“Have you tried calling her?”

“Nah,” Allison said. “She left her cell phone here, and she never answers the office phone at night. She says that’s why she stays late in the first place.”

“But, honey, she’s got young girls home alone.”

“Yeah. We could always call 911, though.”

“But you haven’t? Why haven’t you?”

“It’s not really that big of a deal.” Allison was beginning to sound annoyed.

“Are you hearing anything now?”

Ruth could hear Allison put her hand over the receiver and say, “Are we hearing anything? I mean, I’m just hearing your mom.”

Bethy said something Ruth couldn’t make out and then Allison got back on and said, “We don’t hear anything.” Then she could hear Allison put her hand over the receiver again and say, “But what if they’re just waiting out there for us to get off the phone?”

Ruth heard Bethany give another little shriek. She sounded far away.

“Allison?”

“Yeah?”

“Stop trying to scare Bethany. I mean it. Stop it right now. Was there ever anything in the bushes?”

“Sure. It was something big, like a man, maybe, or a bear. I think it’s gone now, though.”

Ruth gritted her teeth. “Can you swear to me that there’s nothing there?”

“Yeah,” Allison said, clearly bored with the conversation.

“All right. Put Bethy back on, please.”

Bethany got back on the line. “Are you calmer?” Ruth said. “Show me how you’re breathing.” Bethy inhaled and exhaled several times into the receiver. “Good,” Ruth said.

“I’m still kind of scared, though.”

“Listen to me. You’re both fine. Allison is just trying to scare you. I want both of you in bed and with the lights out as soon as you hang up the phone. And I mean immediately. That goes for Allison, too. Have Mimi call me in the morning.”

“You sure there isn’t anything to be afraid of?”

“Well, you can be afraid of Allison, but otherwise, no, nothing.”

“Do you think we should wait up for Mimi?”

“No,” said Ruth. “I don’t. Make sure all the doors and windows are locked, and then go to bed.”

“Okay, Mom. I love you,” Bethany said in her little girl, bedtime voice. “Do you want to say good night to Allison, too? Here.”

Ruth could hear the phone being handed off, and then Allison said, in a crisp, womanly, maddening voice, “Hello?” As though she didn’t know who was on the other end of the line.

“If you ever do that again, and I mean
ever
, there will be hell to pay. Am I clear?”

“Okay. Well, good night. We love you,” Allison said in a singsongy imitation of Bethy.

Ruth suspected that the girl was mocking her. She hung up thinking that she should never, ever have left Bethy down there with those people. What on earth had she been thinking? And now there was nothing she could do but try to hurry Hugh through his crisis and get back to LA as quickly as she possibly could.

Hugh rolled toward her and said sleepily—he could sleep through a tornado—“What was that about?”

“Nothing. It’s all right,” Ruth said. “Go back to sleep.”

B
Y THE THIRD DAY
, B
ETHANY LOVED ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING
about Allison. For one thing, she had flawless skin, whereas Bethany had begun having outbreaks, and in noticeable places. She scrubbed and scrubbed, using a variety of exfoliating products that Allison didn’t want anymore, but it was going to take more than that, at least from what Allison had told her when they were talking in bed last night: it was going to take Accutane, and she couldn’t get that without a prescription, which she couldn’t get until Ruth took her to a dermatologist, which couldn’t happen until Ruth got back, which just frustrated Bethy to
death
. How was she supposed to book anything if she had pimples? You could slather on foundation and concealer—both of which she’d now learned to apply, under Allison’s close supervision—but you really couldn’t fool anyone. “They can still tell you have zits,” Allison had said. “They’re just zits you’ve covered up. If the person who books a role comes down to either you or me, they’re going to choose me, especially if it’s a movie role, because in movies they do insanely tight shots that are your face like six feet high on the screen. They don’t want people sitting in the theater going,
Look at that gross zit!
”

And of course she was right. Allison had already gotten Reba and Hillary started using Proactiv, which was just one step down from Accutane, and neither of them even had breasts yet. Bethany didn’t exactly have breasts, either—at least not like Allison’s, which Bethany had caught a glimpse of when Allison left the bathroom door open a little bit while she was taking her shower—but at least they’d
started
. She bet she’d get her period any minute. Allison had told her a ton of things it turned out she needed to know, to be ready: why you should always carry a tampon (because otherwise you could stand up at some random time and leave a big sticky pool of blood behind without even knowing it, and how gross was
that
); what brand of tampon was best (one with an applicator, because otherwise you just had to shove the thing way up inside you with your own finger, which Allison said she was pretty sure God never ever intended you to do), and what cramps felt like and what to do about them (ibuprofen, immediately). She’d also begun instructing Bethany about what hair styles and accessories made you look the oldest, what it felt like to smoke a cigarette, why you should always carry Purell hand sanitizer and Tic Tacs, and what an erection was (though Bethy was pretty sure Allison was making that one up). It turned out there was a whole world that Bethy hadn’t known was out there, but which she now understood was very important if you were going to be liked and admired, never mind if you were going to book anything.

But the thing Bethany really loved about Allison was that she was a woman of the world. She’d kissed boys, been drunk, had her own debit card, had had a makeover at the MAC counter at Macy’s (which Bethany was going to put on her list of musts when Ruth got back), and traveled alone between Los Angeles and Houston as fearlessly and casually as Bethy took a school bus.

They’d shared lots of other secrets, too, since Bethy had been at Mimi’s. (“You can’t tell any of it to Reba or Hillary when they get back, because they’re just little kids,” Allison had told her firmly, a fact that Bethy knew would make Hillary just crazy if she ever found out.) One of them was that sometimes Allison cut herself with a box cutter. She even let Bethy watch her once. She put the blade against the blue-white skin on the underside of her upper arm and pressed, and as Bethy stared in horrified fascination, a line of blood had bloomed, as delicate as a cobweb. Allison had just laughed and said it didn’t hurt. She’d turned her arm over so Bethy could get a better look at the delicate cross-hatching of scabs and scars. Sometimes, Allison told her, she’d sit there and work on it for hours. Bethy said she thought it was awful, but Allison said there were tribes in Africa that did exactly the same thing to their faces, and no one thought a thing about it. Look at Seal. It was no different than tattoos. Bethy thought there was plenty of difference, but she kept it to herself. Instead she said, “But why?”

Allison had just shrugged. “Sometimes I get, I don’t know, jumpy. Like I’m waiting for something bad to happen. So I cut, and it calms me down.”

The earliest they turned their light out was one in the morning, and Mimi didn’t even care. Her rule was, you could get up whenever you wanted, and if there were two of you or more and Mimi had already gone to work, you could call a taxi and take a cab to the studio whenever you were ready, as long as you had the money. Allison not only paid, but she also tipped the driver, which Bethy didn’t even know you were supposed to do, never mind how much it should be, because she’d really been in a cab only a few times in New York City, and Hugh had paid; and Allison’s voice, when she was talking to the driver, was cool and impersonal, like she’d had someone driving her around all her life. In her mind, Bethy already saw Allison as a movie star, she was that worldly.

She’d have to tell all of this to Rianne when she saw her, which who knew when that would be, especially because Bethy didn’t miss her as much as she used to. She figured Rianne would still be all about finding neat decals to put on her notebooks and other tween stuff, and Bethy was way beyond that now. She talked to producers and casting directors like it was no big deal, and a few of them were starting to remember her.

Yesterday, both Bethy and Allison had auditioned for an independent film with a well-known director of family films who, of course, Bethy had never heard of because, she now realized, she used to be clueless, just
clueless
, about things like that. Allison was having her spend at least half an hour every day on IMDbPro.com to cram on who produced, directed, and starred in what movies, and then she drilled Bethy until she got it right. Allison knew it all by heart, of course, but she told Bethy that she shouldn’t feel bad because she’d been in LA for
years
, so naturally she knew a ton of stuff Bethy didn’t, and maybe wouldn’t, ever.

This afternoon they both had an audition for Carlyle, one of the leads in
After
, a to-die-for feature-length film being directed by Gus Van Sant. Allison said Gus Van Sant was one of the greatest movie directors of all time, and he liked to use nonactors, or barely actors, even for some of his movies’ major roles. So now, on the morning of Bethy’s fifth day at Mimi’s house, they were taking turns running the lines in the kitchen. They were sitting on opposing countertops in the kitchen, each with a copy of the sides in one hand and a mug of steaming coffee (Allison) and hot chocolate (Bethy) in the other. They’d agreed that Bethy would read first, and then they’d switch.

“I bet Quinn’s going out for the brother. He’d be really good,” Allison said, taking dainty sips of coffee. Bethy had watched her put three soup spoons full of Splenda in the cup—“Never use real sugar,” she’d told Bethy, “
ever
”—so it was probably palatable. Allison had made a face when Bethy said she wanted hot chocolate—“Really? I didn’t think anyone drank that anymore, except for maybe Reba”—but on this Bethy had stuck to her guns.

“Go,” Allison said now, so Bethy did.

BUDDY

I’m not buyin’ it.

CARLYLE

What do you mean, you’re not buying it? It’s the truth!

BUDDY

Yeah? So where’s your wand?

CARLYLE

(with infinite weariness)

Buddy. That’s only in Harry Potter. Harry Potter is a book.

BUDDY

So show me something. If you were a real witch you’d be making something happen!

CARLYLE

(sweetly)

I am. I’m making us argue.

BUDDY

Oh, for God’s sake.

CARLYLE

So, okay. Do you remember before, when Nana left her dentures in a glass and the next morning they were blue?

Allison said, “I think the brother’s kind of a douche. I mean, he sure whines a lot.”

“I think it would be awful to have your mom die.”

“I guess.”

“You don’t think so?”

“Well, I mean, it would be hard and everything, because where would you keep all your stuff? Plus you’d probably have to go live in an orphanage, at least until you could get emancipated.”