“Hey? Excuse me? Can you take it?”
Esme pauses, and I flinch when I see the expression on her face before she walks back to take the phone from his hand. For just a moment, my sister looks at me as if I orchestrated the entire exchange on purpose, just to show her how much better I am than her. The guy stands next to me, grinning cluelessly as Esme takes a couple of shots. After it’s done, she wordlessly holds the photo up for me to check, and, when I shrug, she hands the phone back to him. “Lights of Berlin,” I say over my shoulder as I’m getting in the car. The kid squints at me. “What?” “Lights of Berlin. That’s what the hooker movie was called.” * * * ? ? ? It seems that neither of us is in the mood for conversation during the drive back to Coyote Sumac, and when I pull up outside the house, we both stay in our seats, staring out the windshield for a minute. “Do you want to talk about the suspension?” I ask reluctantly. “No,” Esme says, unbuckling her seat belt. “Can we just watch TV or something?” I nod, relieved. Once we’re inside, we both sit down carefully on the sofa, and I turn on an episode of Friends for her. Friends reruns were the only thing guaranteed to be on in whatever country I was filming in, but Esme doesn’t appear to have seen it before. She watches quietly, her eyes tracking the characters and then occasionally flicking back to me. “This show is entirely problematic,” she says, once the episode is over. “But I think I don’t care.” I’m not sure what to say in response, so I just settle into the sofa for the next episode. When Blake pulls up outside, beeping obnoxiously four times, I feel guilty about how relieved I am. Esme bends down and pats me gently on the shoulder like a family dog. “See you next week.” * * * ? ? ? I wash the sticky ice cream off my hands at the kitchen sink, picturing my sister begging our parents to give her permission to come to LA for the afternoon with Blake. It would have taken a lot of convincing, given her suspension from school and their implicit mistrust of Los Angeles. When I was Esme’s age, I was living in a soulless hotel in West Hollywood between shoots, and strange men used to follow me up from the pool bar to my room, banging on the door and shouting until I was forced to call my manager from the bathroom to deal with them. The only other people I had contact with back then were either on commission or outright paid to be there, and I spoke to my parents maybe once, twice a month, until the conversation eventually dried up like the Los Angeles River. Like I said, I think I could feel jealous of my sister if I tried. I turn off the tap and look out the window. The Pacific is glowing fire red in the afternoon sun. I slip out the front door and down the porch steps, drifting toward the water. When the sand becomes damp, I kick off my shoes and then wade into the cold water. There is something calming about the inevitability of it once I’m in, the water icy and my jeans weighing heavy on my hips. I hold my breath as I fully submerge myself, and then I just float on my back for a few minutes. A small, curling wave approaches. I stand up in front of it, waist-deep with my arms stretched out beside me, my body covered in goose bumps. The water crashes against me, and a piece of seaweed hooks around my jeans. I think about what my sister might want from me, knowing that I will never be able to give it to her. My inability to deliver when it really matters has been my one constant in life. Another wave starts to gather, this one bigger. It hits me at chest level, salty water splashing up and stinging my eyes. Soon it feels like I am summoning the waves, stoking them until they come faster and crack even harder against me so that I have to bend my knees to remain upright before they snap back into the sea. For a moment, everything is calm and I face the horizon. I watch a monster wave gathering power until it looms five feet above me, hissing. I hold my breath as the wave crashes over me, and then I am plunged into darkness. Now I am just one other small thing among a million other things, spinning and twisting underneath the water’s surface. The water isn’t so blue under here; it’s blacker and murkier and I’m drifting and my lungs are bursting and it’s simultaneously the most alive and the closest to darkness that I’ve ever been.