SUMMER 1977
Sitting in the dead VW Bug, windows down, four bare feet up on the dashboard. The car was half buried in the hill below Chloe’s little house in Echo Park. Chloe had wiped a clean swath through the leaves and dust on the windshield so they could look across the humpback row of neighboring hills into the smoggy dusk, the whole sky the same livid shade of red, as if the setting sun had burst.
“How much do we need?” Izzy said.
Chloe took a hit of her joint, then set it on the edge of the dashboard’s ashtray.
“Depends where we’re going.”
“Anywhere. I just want to leave.”
Shifting in her seat, Izzy heard the crinkle of the paper folded into her back jeans pocket. She kept the Pig List there, a reminder.
“Five hundred,” Chloe said. “Maybe a thousand.”
“Ugh.”
“How much do you have?”
“Less than that.”
“If we just get to Vegas,” Chloe said, “I can make what we need. I’m a terrific gambler.”
“They won’t let us in.”
“Of course they will. I paid good money for those IDs.”
Chloe leaned forward and picked at a chip of light blue polish on the nail of her big toe. “I was in Vegas a few months ago and walked away with three hundred bucks.”
“Three hundred won’t get us far,” Izzy said.
“That was one night at the tables. Half a night. If we’re there for a week, we’re talking something real.”
The sun slipped below the dash. Izzy lifted her hands and held them out at arms’ length, thumbs and index fingers in Ls or pistols turned to create a rectangle, a frame of film. One of her jobs at the theater was to hang up lobby cards, the cardboard promotional shots distributors sent along with their films. These were often production photos, directors visualizing a moment, men looking at women through a frame of fingers. Sometimes Izzy looked through her own this way, imagining that she could reframe the world before her into a new image.
“What are you doing with your hands?” Chloe said.
“Nothing.” Izzy dropped them into her lap. “What if you lose? In Vegas.”
“I won’t.”
“What if you do?”
“You need to trust.”
“Trust who?”
“Me.” Chloe sat back, grabbed Izzy’s thigh, and squeezed. “The universe. The rightness of all things.”
She needed to get out of the house, out of her head, so she asked Vince to drive up Mulholland so they could watch the day’s end dropping slowly, like the curtain at the close of a play.
“Remember how you used to tell me about racing?” Izzy asked. “You wanted to buy a car and travel from track to track.”
“You remember that?”
“Of course.”
He looked at her for a moment, then turned back to the windshield, the road unfolding, one curve at a time in the lowering dusk.
“Do you still think about it?” she asked.
“I don’t know. It’s been a long time.”
He sounded a little embarrassed at the old daydream.
“What if we did it?” she said.
“Did what?”
“Just kept driving, out there.”
She gestured to the windshield, out there, whatever lay beyond the hilltop rising into view.
Vince pulled his Firebird into a gravel turnout and slowed to a stop. They were pointed toward the valley, the long, low expanse of lights coming on, street by street, in counterpoint to the night.
“I’m serious,” Izzy said.
“Where would we go?”
Izzy turned to him, trying to read his face, to see if he was really considering the possibility. He looked like a man now, a leaner, more thoughtful version of his father.
“Anywhere,” she said.
He took off his sunglasses and turned to her. She could see him struggling, not sure what to make of her sudden proposal. There were quick moments of resolution, flickering in and out, where it seemed like he would move into action, put the car back into gear and drive them down through that long grid of lights. Izzy wanted to grab that look, that moment; she wanted to hold it and say, Yes, let’s.
But she was too timid, then too late. Vince looked away, and his face settled, back to earth.
“Your parents want what’s best for you,” he said. “And my dad, my mom—we couldn’t do that.”
Izzy wished she could step back in time just for half a minute, long enough to grab that moment, to meet him there and move them both through. But it had passed, and in its wake all the anger and sadness that had moved aside for that moment returned. She hadn’t even realized it was gone until it all came back.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” she said.
“Izzy—”
“Forget it. It was a stupid thing to say.”
“What time is it?” Chloe’s voice on the other end of the line was thick with interrupted sleep.
“Let’s go. I have enough for a couple of bus tickets,” Izzy said. “A hotel room for a night or two.”
“Comped.”
“What?”
“They’ll comp the room if we’re gambling,” Chloe said.
Izzy stood at her window, the arroyo a black slash below, the dark hills above punctuated with tiny points of orange streetlight, porch light, insomniac window light.
The phone at her ear was called a princess phone, the receiver white and smooth and curved like a swan’s neck. Izzy had never really thought of the name of the phone until now. When the call is over she’ll pull the cord from the wall and open the window and throw the fucking thing out into the night.
“Okay,” Chloe said. “When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“That’s awfully soon.”
“Not soon enough.”
“Are you okay, Izzy? Because you sound—”
“Not soon enough.”