Evidently I’ll be packing for both of us, as Stella’s at her most helpless today, drinking and binge-watching the weather while draped across the couch like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby. I keep expecting her to raise her wrist to her forehead and proclaim she always waits for the longest day of the year and then misses it. We are just past the longest day of the year, and it’s exactly the sort of thing she’d do; I’m sure she wishes she’d played Daisy in the latest film adaptation.
As I gather discarded hats and shoes from around the bungalow, I can make out the reporters on TV debating whether newly upgraded Hurricane Celia, at the moment a category one, will turn north and head for Miami, or keep moving east, straight for us.
“Roberta’s changed her dress,” Stella announces. Roberta being the weather girl she’s now on a first-name basis with. “Purple looks good on her,” she adds with a flourish of her hand that sends the nearly empty cocktail glass perched on the arm of the couch crashing to the floor. “Oops,” she says in reference to the glass, but she doesn’t move to pick it up. “Fee, can you get me another glass of rum, pretty please?”
I take a bottle of fizzy water from the fridge and hand it to her. She looks at it like I’ve handed her a dirty diaper. “Drink this first,” I say. Then, off her look, “Dehydration is terrible for your skin.”
At this she sighs and twists off the cap. “I’m onto you,” she slurs as I sweep up the broken glass. But she drinks the water.
Initially I encouraged her alcoholism, thinking it would make her more likely to spill what happened to my mother, but I quickly found that Stella’s an incredibly frustrating person to try to get anything out of—largely because she has the memory of a goldfish—and the pills and alcohol only make it worse. The things she does remember, she’s embellished so frequently that she’s no longer sure herself what’s real and what’s fantasy. Every so often a memory will surface and I can see her gingerly lift it, dripping, out of the mire of her mind, then hold it up to the light to examine. Is it her memory or the memory of a character she played? Something that really happened or something she only wished or dreamed happened? It’s hard enough for her to determine, and she was—or wasn’t—there. I’m completely lost.
I’d thought the memoir she plans to write would be my ace in the hole; I’ve been sneaking glances at her journal every chance I get, but besides one interesting entry about the warning Jackson’s mom gave her before she married Cole, all she’s written are short, meaningless passages about things that don’t matter in the context of Iris’s death.
Nothing’s going according to plan.
My sole objective, from the day my mother died, has been to determine who killed her and exact revenge. Every. Single. Thing I’ve done in the past thirteen years has been in pursuit of that goal. The move to Los Angeles, the backbreaking martial arts classes, the complete avoidance of any connection with other humans—it’s all been in service of this singular objective. I’ve been a machine. I have an encyclopedic knowledge of pharmaceuticals and the doses needed for illness, sleep, or death; I can bring a two-hundred-pound man to his knees in a dozen ways, change identities at the drop of a hat, and dig up dirt on absolutely anyone; I’ve never had a romantic relationship, best friend, or even a real social media profile, and very few photographs of me exist in the world. The cherry on top: I’ve now miraculously managed to weasel my way onto a small island with the three people who know what really happened to Iris that night—at least one of whom must be responsible—and yet I’ve completely failed in my mission. I’ve not learned a thing about how Iris died, somehow ended up in front of the camera (and worse, liked it), and most inconveniently, developed what I’m beginning to think might be real feelings for the boy who perhaps could have saved her but didn’t.
On the positive side, I’ve become indispensable to the woman who at best covered up her death and at worst murdered her—but now that I’ve gotten to know Stella, I honestly can’t imagine her capable of murdering anyone, so I’m not sure that can go in the win column. I had to “humanely remove” a giant spider from the bathtub before she got in the other night because she was deathly afraid of it but couldn’t stand to hurt it. And the mother that stole all her money when she was young? I later found out Stella continued to pay her rent for years afterward, until she could no longer afford it.
If I’ve learned anything from her, it’s that tabloids are trash, so I shouldn’t be surprised that I’ve yet to see a glimmer of her “famous temper.” Nor have I noticed an ounce of jealousy—the opposite, really. She idolizes beauty and talent, even if it belongs to a younger woman, and has been most encouraging of my acting. Though she’s never divulged the specific reason she and Cole broke up all those years ago, she has mentioned that he cheated, and there was the nugget she dropped about his fetish for sleeping beauties. So I guess my operation hasn’t been a complete wash.
During the years I spent alone in my mother’s old bedroom secretly watching every movie Cole and Stella ever did, I saw an independent film Cole starred in about men who had a sexual fascination with sleeping girls. He’d been young in the film, a good decade younger than when he met my mother, and his character had
