As I gazed up at my own personal North Star, I wondered: If she left me this house, would I live here? I couldn’t imagine Charlie wanting it, though it was arguably more a family home than a house for a singleton. But maybe being here would help me finally get back to myself? Northern California was cool, with its rugged cliffs and rolling hills, but Los Angeles was my home. I loved the splendor of Beverly Hills, the grit of Hollywood, the patchwork predictability of the Valley. Plus all my true friends were here—the ones who had known me long enough to know I wasn’t broken, just a work in progress.
I closed my eyes and waited for sleep. The hum of my whiskey buzz was growing faint. The bottle was on my nightstand, just an arm’s length away. But I resisted the urge to reach for it. Perhaps, with no one to remind me of all the ways I had failed, I could finally, for the first time in my adult life, not feel like a failure.
The systematic decimation of my confidence started when I was in the fifth grade. In what began a long tradition of controlling my brother and me with money, Mom decided we should get an allowance. Every Sunday she would put out two jars of marbles: one for me, one for Charlie. Charlie’s marbles were the color of a bright blue sky. Mine were black. Each marble represented twenty-five cents. We both got twenty marbles—or the equivalent of five dollars. Those were our marbles, Mom said. Every single one of them. As long as we didn’t do anything between that Sunday and the next to warrant her taking them away.
It’s well known by psychologists and anyone with a beating heart that the pain of losing something you’re told is already yours is far greater than the pain of not getting something you wish for in the abstract. Those marbles were dangled in front of us like raw meat outside the cage of a hungry lion. We were ravenous for them. But every time we failed to be perfect—forgot to make our beds, got a poor grade on a test, ate candy before dinner, or after dinner, or at all—Mom would ceremoniously remove a marble from the jar. It was the worst kind of torture. I lived in constant fear of playing a wrong note, misspelling a word, getting fat, getting a pimple. As we got older and those marbles became dollars instead of quarters, the fear only grew. Who knows? Maybe those marbles were how I got into Stanford? Or maybe they were the reason I was such a mess now.
Mom’s death was the end of something. Which meant it was also the beginning of something else. I felt a stirring in my belly. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it might be hope? As I lay there in the darkness, I imagined hope as a baby bird, teetering at the edge of her nest, looking out at the expansive earth below. Maybe, with the tether of the inferiority complex Mom had wrapped around my neck finally lifted, I could let that little bird fly now?
If not, there was always whiskey.
CHAPTER 26
* * *
CHARLIE
“How did she look?” Marcela asked as soon as she picked up the phone. I could hear the baby crying in the background, as he often did when we put him down for his morning nap. He was an early riser—up at dawn, then impossibly tired by 9:00 a.m. It was a dreadful schedule, but my wife insisted on letting him “tell us what he needs,” rather than force any sort of sane routine on him.
“I didn’t see her,” I said as I struggled to tie my tie. I hadn’t worn one since my wedding, and had barely known how to tie it back then. “She didn’t want a viewing.”
“She wanted you to remember her looking hearty and vibrant,” my wife said. “Not pale and defeated. It’s for the best.”
I felt a knot swell in my throat. “Yeah,” I choked out. Things may have been strained between my mother and me, but no one should have to die alone.
“Charlie,” my wife said sternly, “I forbid you to feel in any way responsible for this. What she asked you to do was madness!”
“I don’t feel responsible,” I lied. Because to admit that my mother’s premature death was my fault would have implicated Marcela, too, and I wasn’t in the mood to fight. “I just would have liked to say goodbye,” I added, to explain my tears.
“She pushed you away,” Marcela reminded me. “It was her choice to vilify you for your perfectly sane decision.”
I couldn’t decide if it was disrespectful or fitting that Mom’s life was going to be so quickly and efficiently buttoned up: whisked off to the funeral home at dawn, burial next day at ten, will reading at eleven, no wake, no service, no fanfare. It reminded me of one of her garden parties, which were always too scheduled to be any fun. I remember her printed itineraries: Bar opens at 5:30, passed hors d’oeuvres from 5:45 ’til 6:30, guests take their seats at 6:45, speeches at 6:50 . . . She left nothing to chance. I half wondered if she had called the funeral home to come get her body herself: “I’m not feeling well, it’s looking like I’ll be dead by tomorrow,” I imagined her saying, “so if you don’t hear from me, send someone first thing in the morning—we don’t want my stench wafting through the house. Come through the garden, I’ll leave the back door open.”