At home, Firooz was waiting at the door. Rebecca’s father had called twice, he said. She sped toward the study. Daniel’s ears were ringing from the nightclub, the crowd, and the echo of the photo, and he was glad Peter and Laila hadn’t come home with them. They’d gone back to his hotel room or her apartment; Daniel scarcely cared. He waited in the living room, wondering why Walter had called twice in one night. When Rebecca was finished, she went to the garden instead of joining him in the living room. He thought he should leave her alone. When she returned, her clothes and hands were covered with soil.
He got up. “What’s wrong?”
Rebecca held her breath. “My sister is dead.” Her voice broke. “Sandy’s dead.”
Daniel rushed toward her and wrapped her in his arms. She fell into him with a guttural sound, a single declaration of pain. He led her to the sofa, where she held on to him tightly.
“She took too much. She fell asleep on her back. She threw up, and . . .” Rebecca covered her mouth.
Daniel rocked her in his arms as the story poured forth. Sandy had died in an apartment in a northern swath of the San Fernando Valley, where all the buildings looked alike, the only variation the color and message of the graffiti. It was one of those places nobody knew, but everybody knew of. Her mother was in the hospital, recovering from shock, sedated with something that ended in -bital. The funeral would take place in five days. Rebecca was shivering as she told the story. “Let’s get you warmed up,” he said softly.
He helped Rebecca upstairs. It seemed each time they’d climbed these steps since the accident, they were fleeing something. Usually each other, but not tonight. He drew her a bath and sat on the floor of the bathroom beside the tub. She said she didn’t want to talk. Daniel held her hand in the bathwater until it was cold and thought about Sandy. Her death was a shock, but not a surprise. By the time he had met Rebecca, Sandy was already a painful subject. She’d been a flower child, belonging not to daisies and marigolds but to flowers that killed. The same flowers that filled Daniel’s days. The most striking thing about Sandy, besides a beauty that had faded by twenty-five, had been her voice, an incongruous blend of apathy and overwrought emotion unique to addicts. Always looking for a cause, she had wanted to stand for everything, and so she’d fallen for anything put before her. Dubious groups solicited funds for nondescript causes, and she fell for their scams. Young men plotted revolutions and wrote novellas, and she fell for them, too. Sandy kept on falling until she’d crashed through the floorboards of her life and ended up squatting with her ill-weather friends in gray-block buildings and abandoned shops. She had died like the Stupid Man who used to loiter in front of Daniel’s house when he was a boy. Despite her privilege and her wealth, she’d been just like him, the old wretch who would stare at Daniel’s fancy house and shake his fist at its walls as he dragged his feet over the dust.