house and living together again, in spite of why they were moving there.
Annie's first days at her father's house were difficult. Being there without their mother was newer to her than to the others. They had already been there for three weeks without her. For Annie, it was all fresh. She knew the house perfectly, so could move around fairly easily, but in every room she expected to hear her mother's voice. She walked into her closets, and felt her clothes with her fingers and put them to her face. She could smell her perfume, and almost sense her in the room. It was agony at times being there, and reminded her again and again of her last vision of the steering wheel slipping out of her mother's hands as she flew out of the car. The memory haunted Annie, and she spoke of it during every session with Dr. Steinberg. She couldn't get it out of her mind, nor the feeling that she should have done something to stop it, but there hadn't been time. She even dreamed of it at night, and losing Charlie after the accident just made things worse. In some ways, she was glad she was moving to New York, and not back to Florence. She needed a fresh start. But her father had agreed not to give up her apartment there for a while.
Her treatment plan when she left the hospital was fairly straightforward, and the ophthalmologist explained it to Sabrina as well. Sabrina was beginning to feel more like Annie's mother than her sister. She was responsible for everyone now. Annie, Candy because she was still so young and irresponsible at times, and their father, who seemed to be getting more helpless by the hour. He lost things, broke things, cut himself twice, and couldn't remember where anything was, or worse, had never known. Sabrina commented to Tammy on the phone late one night that their mother must have done everything except chew his food for him. He had been totally pampered, protected, and spoiled. She had been the consummate wife, and it wasn't Sabrina's style. She tried to get him to do some things for himself, with very little success. He complained a lot, whined constantly, and cried often. It was understandable, but Sabrina was at her wit's end dealing with him and everything else.
Annie's doctor wanted her to have follow-up CT scans after her brain surgery, and he had strongly recommended that she attend a training school for the blind in New York for six months. He had told her and Sabrina that it would allow Annie to become independent, and able to live successfully on her own, which was ultimately their goal. Annie had been sullen about it for days after they talked, and wandered around her father's house looking depressed. She had a white cane, but wouldn't use it. In her parents' house she managed well, as long as no one moved anything. Candy left a chair out of place in the dining room, and as Annie cruised through the room unsuspectingly, she fell flat on her face. Candy apologized profusely as she helped her up.
“That was not cute!” Annie said, furious with her, but more at the fates that had humbled her this way. “Why did you do that?”
“I forgot… I'm sorry…I didn't do it on purpose!” It was the kind of thing Candy would have said as a child, and still did. Intent was all that mattered to her, not result.
Annie was determined to bathe herself alone, and forbade her sisters to come into the bathroom with her, although she'd never been modest before, and no one in the family really was. Their father was circumspect and never appeared at breakfast without a robe, and their mother had been as well, but the girls had always drifted in and out of each other's bathrooms, looking for hair dryers, curling irons, nail polish remover, clean panty hose, and a missing bra, in various states of undress. Now Annie went in fully dressed and closed and locked the door. Her second day home, her bathtub had overflowed, and as water poured through the dining room chandelier directly below it, Sabrina realized what had happened, and ran upstairs. She pounded on the door, and Annie finally let her in. Sabrina turned the tub off for her, standing in two inches of water on the marble floor.
“This isn't working,” Sabrina said calmly. “I know you don't want it, but you need help. You need to learn some tricks of the trade here, or you're going to drive yourself and everyone else nuts. What can I do to help?” Sabrina asked, cleaning up the bathroom.
“Just leave me alone!” she shouted at her and locked herself in her room.
“Fine,” Sabrina steamed, but said nothing more. In the end, she had to call an electrician, a carpeting firm to dry the carpets, and a painter to repair the damage. Annie was furious with both her sister and herself. It took two more incidents for Annie to agree to at least think about going to school in September, to learn how to deal constructively with being blind. Until then she pretended to herself that it was a temporary condition and she could deal with it on her own. She couldn't. That much was clear to all of them, and her anger at all of them was very wearing. She was no longer anyone they recognized. She wouldn't even let Sabrina or Candy help her comb or brush her hair, and the second week she was home she chopped it off herself. The results were disastrous, and Sabrina found her sitting in her room, on the floor, sobbing, with her long auburn hair all around her. She looked like she'd been attacked by a buzz saw, and when Sabrina saw her, she put her arms around her and they both cried.
“Okay,” Annie said finally, resting her head on her sister's shoulder, “okay…I can't do this…I hate being blind… I'll go to school… but I don't want a dog.”
“You don't have to have a dog.” But she clearly needed help. Just seeing her in the mental state she was in was depressing their father too. He felt helpless when he watched her stumble and fall, pour hot coffee on her hand as she tried to fill the cup, or spill her food like a two-year-old.
“Can't you do something for her?” he asked Sabrina miserably.
“I'm trying,” she said, doing her best not to snap at him. She was calling Tammy five and six times a day, who was feeling guilty for having left, and still hadn't found anyone to fill the pregnant star's place. Her life was in turmoil too, and she felt as though she was letting her family down by being in L.A. All of them were desperately unhappy in one way or another, and Annie most of all.
She finally let Candy fix her hair. She was too embarrassed to go to their mother's hairdresser to let them clean it up. She didn't want them to see her that way, blind, with hair that looked like it had been lopped off with a machete. She had used her desk scissors, and it looked pretty bad. Her hair had been beautiful, silky, and long, much like Candy's, only longer and a reddish-brown color instead of blond.
“Okay, new hairdo coming right up,” Candy said, sitting on the floor with her the day after she'd cut off her hair. Until then, she looked like she'd just been let out of prison. Her hair was sticking up all over the place, some bits were short, others were slightly longer, and all of it was a mess. “I'm actually pretty good at this,” Candy reassured her. “I'm always cleaning up people's hair after shoots, when some nutjob psycho hairdresser does something that fucks the model's hair up even if it looked great at the shoot. But the good news here,” Candy said cheerfully, “is that you can't see what I'm doing. So if I fuck it up, you won't get mad.” What she said was so awful that it made Annie laugh, and she sat, looking docile, for the entire procedure as Candy snipped, tugged, brushed, combed, and snipped some more. It looked stylish and adorable when she was through, and Annie looked like an elegant Italian elf with a slightly spiked top and a little longer on the sides, and all of it framed her face with its shining copper color and set off her green eyes. Candy was just admiring her work when Sabrina walked into her bedroom, and saw hair all over the floor. The room was a disaster, but Annie looked prettier than ever, as though she'd gone to a top hairdresser in London or Paris for her new style.
“Wow!” she said, as she stood in the doorway, impressed by how competent Candy was. It was her business, after all, to look stylish, sexy, and fashionable. It was the best haircut Sabrina had seen in years. “Annie, you look fantastic! It's a whole new you. And now we know what Candy can do if her modeling career ever tanks. You can definitely open a hair salon. You can do mine any day.”
“Do I really look okay?” Annie asked, looking worried. It had been a major gesture of confidence to let Candy cut her hair. She had had no idea how bad it looked after her irate hack job-totally awful and scary-looking. And Candy had transformed it into something magical and cute. It was sexy and young, like Annie herself, and actually looked better on her than her long straight hair, which Candy had always told her made her look like a hippie, and half the time she wore it in a braid. She had gone from Mother Earth to movie star in half an hour, at Candy's hands.
“You look a lot better than okay,” Sabrina reassured her. “You look like the cover of
“Oops…,” Candy said, looking embarrassed. She hadn't even noticed. She never did. She was so used to other people waiting on her and cleaning up after her, on shoots and even in her apartment, that she was totally unaware of the mess she'd made. There was hair everywhere. “Sorry, Sabrina. I'll clean it up.”
“Sorry,” Annie added, wishing she could help, but there was no way she could see the hair, or even sense it, to
