I got out of going back to the Buick set by saying I had a migraine. I feel bad about this now, because I was kind of being a shit that whole trip, but Lila understood migraines because she had migraines all the time. I don’t think I’ve ever really had one. Edwina said, Let her rest, and I’ll bring her by later.
We sat around in the suite, watching Edwina’s favorite morning shows in luxury. The suite had a living room and three bedrooms, thanks to Buick. Then we went out for a late breakfast at the Griddle Cafe and ate until we were about to bust.
Look! I texted. Pancakes.
Look! The guy who washed dishes at the Cliff House restaurant, flashing me a peace sign.
“Everything okay at the house?” Edwina asked. She crumpled up her napkin and tossed it onto her plate before pushing it away. She must have seen Lila’s bruise, because she stared across the table like she meant business. I licked a bit of sticky syrup from my finger.
Telling her the truth felt like tattling, but she was supposed to be looking out for me. Edwina was the one person who always did. And I was probably the one person who loved and cared for Edwina. I mean, look at the history: Her husband, Hal, ditched her and Lila. Her own father had done the same thing. She was pretty much raised by her grandmother after that. And she’d been the baby in the arms of the beautiful Ella, escaping a violent man during the 1906 earthquake.
And now, a lot of the time, Lila treated Edwina like a servant.
Then again, it was Edwina who’d brought Lila to LA when she was fourteen to get her into acting. She pushed her into it so they could make money to survive. Lila wasn’t at that particular coffee shop by accident. If you thought about it, Lila had sort of been a toaster to Edwina and Hal, too—useful, an object, discarded when it stopped being shiny. The women in my family have probably felt like that doll with the blank eyes and the smile for years and years and years—beautiful, voiceless, occasionally played with, tossed wherever their owner put them. Being an object was something that got handed down, same as that doll had.
“They fight.” I didn’t tell Edwina about the paintings, or the man parked outside our house. I didn’t tell her how bad the fighting was.
Loyalty was confusing when there was always a triangle.
Blame was confusing when stories went so far back, you couldn’t see where they started.
Edwina and I didn’t meet Lila later like we said we would. I could tell she was hurt, but we didn’t want to go. We sat around watching TV in our hotel robes and then hung out by the pool, me in my bikini, Edwina in her white shorts and flowered shirt and Rite Aid sandals. We picked up Lila when filming was over. We went to dinner. Then we went back to the suite and ordered all these room service desserts. It felt like the old days, since Buick was paying. I didn’t feel guilty or worried about the cheesecake and the torte and the lemon pie.
It was fun. Lila was kind of leaving me out then, buddying up with Edwina, teasing her about the old days, when Edwina would sit up and wait for Lila to come home after a date, even though Lila was thirty-three and already had a kid.
An object, an owned thing. A napkin. A magazine. A knife. A toaster.
A kid.
Me.
The next day, we went out for breakfast again, the three of us this time. Edwina had brought along the latest Inside Entertainment magazine. She just loved all that stuff, which is probably why she pushed Lila in that direction in the first place. Plus money, of course. But while we waited for our food, Edwina folded the magazine to a particular page and pushed it across the table to Lila.
“Look. Look who it is. Did you see this? Asshole.”
“I saw.” Lila spread the thinnest layer of jam on a piece of toast. “Karma. Finally getting what he deserves.”
It was Rex Clancy, the director. Accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of female actors. I’d heard Rex Clancy’s name in our houses for years. He was important. He’d given Lila her first role, in The Girl Is Gone. She’d also worked with him on The Winding Road before Nefarious and The Grange, that historical drama that no one saw. Rex Clancy, well, you know. He’s got, like, four chins and is the gross kind of guy with unidentifiable food in his beard.
“What? What’d he do? Did he do something to you?” It was shocking news, but I wanted to know stuff that summer. All stuff. I wasn’t the child with tender little flower-petal ears anymore.
“More than something, and he wasn’t the only one, as we’re well aware,” Lila said, and met Edwina’s eyes. Important stories passed between them. Really important.
“Did you ever tell anyone?”
Lila made that scoffing sound in the back of her throat, meaning she knew things I could never imagine.
“No, I didn’t tell anyone. For the same reason no one else did.” Lila waved the magazine. “Safety in numbers. It had to take, what…” She read the magazine. “Two dozen women before anyone would risk it. That man was in charge of my bank account, and my career. My whole life He sat in the big chair. He signed the checks.”
“He was a sex maniac,” Edwina said. She looked like an old lady when she said it. Her eyes got all narrow, and her face wrinkled up like she’d eaten something sour.
“Oh, stop! It’s not about sex! It’s about power, and that’s all. Who has it, who doesn’t, who can just take whatever they want. Assholes with big egos, that’s who. I’m over this conversation,” Lila said. And then she tossed the magazine onto her dirty plate, where it sat on the smear of yellow from her eggs and the toast crusts, and the napkin with her lipstick marks on it.
That afternoon, the three of us went shopping. Edwina was usually all judgy and careful about excess spending, but she was having a blast. She was wearing her polyester pants and blouse, and those shoes with the thick bottoms that didn’t hurt her feet, and she was like a girl on her birthday in those boutiques. Well, she was beautiful once, too. I saw the photos of her wedding to Hal, which were in an album she kept hidden in a drawer.
Lila bought herself a purse and some earrings and two scarves, and she bought Edwina the same purse, plus this satiny dress that you could tell Edwina wanted so bad but would probably never wear. Lila bought a pair of sandals in gold for her and white for me. We all got these necklaces with our initials on them.
She used a debit card. No credit this time. I would never admit how much she spent. I won’t say the number. It was probably a good chunk of the Buick money. I didn’t know how we could spend like that, but apparently we could.
When Lila was in the dressing room trying on this peach silk sheath, Edwina and I waited next to a table of jewelry and accessories.
“What did Lila mean when she said Rex Clancy wasn’t the only one?” I asked. I couldn’t get it out of my mind—that look they’d shared.
It wasn’t the time or place. The saleswoman hovered nearby. A woman with a dog in her purse reached for a bracelet.
“A neighbor man. When she was twelve,” Edwina whispered. “He told her not to tell. We moved after that.”
Lila came out of that dressing room with the shimmering peach sheath over her arm. The relaxing music played in the store. Edwina had gone on to look at a table of scarves, as if these were the sorts of things that just happened to everyone in one way or another. My stomach ached. I felt sick. I had thought, you know, that one day you weren’t in the world where grown men wanted you and then you were, but this wasn’t really true. Grown men had always been there, in our world.
The next day, before our evening flight home, Lila had a car take us to Disneyland. I know it’s hard to imagine. Edwina in her Lane Bryant shorts and her sun hat, and Lila in that tight yellow sundress with her big sunglasses, and me, walking between them like a little kid. Lila had gotten some special pass that allowed us to get to the front of the line. We hurried around. They kept saying, “The baby needs to go on the pirate ride! The baby can’t miss the haunted house!” And we’d all get on, except for any halfway wild ones, when Edwina and Lila would wait, Lila sipping her iced coffee and autographing stuff like mouse-ear hats and park maps and whatever women had in their purses. A lot of people recognized her that day. Some tried to be respectful and only snuck glances, and others barged right up to ask for photos, but most fell somewhere in the middle, pretending to take a picture of the Dumbo ride while trying to get her in the background.
When I told Meredith about it all later on the phone, she said, Weird, Syd. Her voice sounded full of… horror. I thought she’d say, How awesome or Lucky you. I think it was the baby stuff that freaked her out. It was one of the many things that were so normal to me that I couldn’t see how abnormal they were to anyone else. Meredith—well, it was funny, because a lot of people actually do have those perfect families like the ones you see on TV, but a lot of people don’t.
And that day, I’m not sure I really minded all the baby stuff. I mean, there’d been that bad fight with Jake, and the way she’d cried that night, and the orange makeup on her arm, and the disturbing news about Rex Clancy and the neighbor. At Disneyland, she held my hand, and she and Edwina were both shoving me this way and that, having fun like kids without a care in the world, and people were remembering to shower Lila with love.
It was like I was giving her something that made her really happy.
When Lila and I got home that night, it was clear that something had changed at the Sea Cliff house. Max greeted us as usual, but it was dark downstairs. The big doors were open, though. Out on the patio, there was a towel on the chaise longue, and Jake’s shoes were tossed on the White Room floor. A warm wind blew in, ruffling the pages of a magazine. It was eerie.
“Jake?” Lila called.
In the kitchen, that stack of bills had disappeared. Jake’s sweatshirt hung over the back of a chair. Jake himself was up in the media room. He had his cocktail next to him, and he was watching a movie. It was a hot night, and he was wearing only a pair of shorts. His shirt was off. He was stretched out, his legs up on the ottoman.
“Hey, girls,” he said. He didn’t get up. Lila went and kissed him hello. She kissed him like the air had cleared between them. You bitch! he’d screamed, and there’d been a bruise on her arm, but she’d forgiven him, which meant I was supposed to forgive him too. There was this strange moment when I just stood there, and I knew I had to greet him, so I gave him a hug, a quick hug, and my hands were on the bare skin of his back. He smelled like sun lotion and sweat and alcohol.
The thing that had changed was that Jake had moved in. Permanently.
There would be the three of us now. A triangle.