“Eating out where?” says Lydia.
“Eating out your pussy,” says Rachel.
Their mother doesn’t bat a lash, she’s so used to this shit. “Pizza, then,” she says, and leaves the room.
Michael sinks into the couch. He studies the room which, despite bearing the same wall-hangings that have been here since his parents bought the house over thirty years prior, feels strangely different.
“New curtains?”
“New TV,” replies Rachel. Which should have been obvious, a fifty-inch monitor in place of the boxy old one. “And a new stereo, and lamps, and desk, and the couch you’re currently sitting on.”
Michael looks down. He finds himself on a leather sofa.
“Where did all this stuff come from?”
“Dad bought it.”
“Why would Dad buy living room furniture? He doesn’t leave the game room.”
“Beats me,” says Rachel, occupied by something on her tablet.
“What are you doing on that thing?”
She turns it so Michael can see. Rachel appears to be operating a remote drone that hovers outside Donny’s window. Donny makes himself a sandwich, slathering too much mayo on both slices of bread. The slats from the shades slightly shadow the image, but otherwise the picture is clear.
“Does he know you’re watching?”
“I think he gets off on it.”
As if on cue, Donny looks into the camera, makes a V with his fingers, wags his tongue between them.
“Do you get off on it?”
“I just want to make sure he isn’t doing anything sketchy, like cooking meth.”
“Right,” says Michael, unsure if this is a legitimate concern.
The scorpion covers Rachel’s acne scars, but they’re still visible, and she still has a thin layer of down on her chin, and brown eyes so light they’re almost clay-colored, and the habit of unconsciously biting one side of her lip in a way that makes the other puff out like it’s been punched, and slightly elfin ears, the tips of which poke through her stringy hair. She’s wearing an old T-shirt of Michael’s and a pair of their father’s moccasins, and as he stares at his sister in the blue TV light, Michael realizes he’s crying.
He covers his face with his hands. Rachel doesn’t say a word or make a move to touch him. She doesn’t turn off the TV. Donny doesn’t have crying jags often, but occasionally they come. Early on, Rachel tried to comfort him during these outbursts, but quickly realized that a hand on his shoulder or trite words of consolation made him angry. Men don’t want their sensitivity acknowledged or condescendingly soothed. They prefer to be politely ignored.
Rachel can’t imagine how Michael feels. She, herself, always felt a kinship with Ricky, who, like her, was unapologetically weird and usually high. He was also unjudgmental, whereas Michael always seemed to want something more out of Rachel, was always so transparently disappointed in the person she’d become. A person—she might add, if she and Michael ever actually talked—who despite her appearance and disinterest in words like career, is fairly happy and surprisingly mature; a person who has become an adult under adverse circumstances; who’s built a real, if occasionally difficult, relationship with a complicated guy; a person gainfully employed and good at her job; a person who has her shit semi-together.
After a moment, the sobbing stops. The siblings watch the movie in silence. The protagonist’s anti-counterfeiting crusade has taken her to the Oval Office where she gives an impassioned speech on the inviolability of the human heart. Her dead father’s, in this case, calcified, and clenched in her palm like she’s about to chuck a curveball.
“Tell me something about Donny,” says Michael.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, a fact or something. I want to get to know him as a person. The man behind the magnets.”
“Why?”
“Because my sister loves him. So there must be something special about him.”
“Barf.”
21.
That was the East Coast, an earlier life. Broder BC, as he thinks of it—Before California.
Rehab wasn’t an initial success. Five stints in as many years. Between, there were halfway houses, friends’ couches and basements, a quasi-girlfriend’s West Hollywood condo where he found a dozen infant turtles dead in the pool. He nodded off along the Venice boardwalk with dreadlocked white dudes and their hemp-collared dogs. He worked at a car wash and brought paper-bag lunches, Oscar Mayer turkey with mustard on rye, and he watched the clean cars emerge into sunlight, and for that brief moment he believed in redemption. He took the bus and he pitied the other riders, and he pitied himself the squandered promise of his stupid pedigree: highborn Broder breathing bus fumes, crumpled over the wheel well, chugging along. Soon he was stumbling: bar-lit, street-lit, kicking clumps of sod from pristine lawns. His sponsor hooked him up with a busing gig at a Koreatown steakhouse and Broder did Oxy with the chefs in the back. He copped. He called his father. He returned to rehab.
They met in the lunchroom on her twenty-first birthday. Three candles in an Entenmann’s donut. Powdered-sugar residue caked to paper plates. With a straw, she pretended to snort.
He hadn’t seen her before, but he knew the type. She of the stepdad’s Malibu beach house, of the solstice parties filled with C-list celebs skinny-dipping at dawn, coke-numbed to the cold. Her type lay on the porch and evened their tans. In Group, they rarely shared.
Broder didn’t condescend. His own weed grew from the same privileged garden. The only difference was age. At twenty-six, he’d reached recidivism’s terminal stage.
“My name’s Broder,” Broder said.
She asked if that was a first or last name. He said it was a mononym, like Prince or Madonna. Her laugh was high-pitched and horsey, a laugh-slash-neigh. Her teeth were corn-colored and metallically capped, and one was brown-stained with what looked like an H. Her T-shirt said Stay Gold in lamé. He liked that. Irony was hard to come by in California.
Broder was wrong about the stepdad, but right about the beach house. At first that’s where they stayed, at poolside remove from chemical temptation.
Aliana taught Broder to cook. Simple dishes: fried eggs, omelets, spaghetti with meat sauce. She was
