Oh, after everything.
When I was a kid, I always wondered what it meant to have a nervous breakdown—like, did you shake nervously? We have different words for it now, like “panic attacks.” “PTSD.” “Anxiety.” “Depressive syndrome.” So many diagnoses. My body was the part of me that was wounded, but my mind felt equally battered. Surprising after so many things could have wrecked me, but the attack in my own front yard was the trauma that broke the camel’s back.
Breathing the beach air helps. I walk slowly, admiring the crash of waves into the rocks, the spray that spits high into the air. The water is turquoise in the shallows, dark gray out toward the horizon. Even noticing this tiny detail eases the muscles along the back of my neck. I think of Mary Oliver, exhorting us to go outside when we’re in despair. Under my breath, I recite “Wild Geese,” a poem I memorized to give myself comfort.
My energy is flagging and I head back up the bluff. The stairs are wood, seven flights broken by small landings. At each stop, I turn and look back over the ocean. In the distance, a trail of dolphins makes its leaping way along a cresting wave, and a peregrine falcon sails over the top of the stacks, seeking lunch among the murres, who fly away in terror at a gull’s warning. It’s cold and damp, but the air feels good in my lungs. Healing.
The stairs end between two houses, one a recent sleek glass design, the other a ’70s build with the rafters and rectangular windows so prevalent in that period—a fact I would not know if Phoebe hadn’t talked about architecture at least 40 percent of the time when we hiked up here to visit “our” house.
I let myself in and toss the keys on the table in the foyer.
Now what?
The silence that greets me is total. At my house in the Hollywood Hills, a small crew of people is often around—a housekeeper who comes five days a week and a chef who leaves prepared meals in my fridge, an assistant who handles everything from media requests to massage appointments, gardeners who tend the drought-friendly landscaping. There are others, specific to the season and task.
Here, the silence is deafening, the only sound the roar of the ocean. Cleaners do come twice a week, and I’m sure I’ll find a meal service, but it will probably be delivery. In the absence of noise and bustle, I’m left with only myself and my thoughts, which seem chaotic and restless, bouncing from one thing to the next like a pinball.
My giant, long-haired Himalayan Ragdoll cat, Yul Brynner, wanders out and meows at me.
“I know. I’ve got you, babe.” I stroke his silky head. “Let’s get a snack.”
I wander into the kitchen, think about a cup of tea, decide against it. Wander into the living room with its shelves and shelves of books and run my fingers over their spines. They’re actual books I’ve actually read, not pretend titles lined up by color. Phoebe has always been a bookworm, and she got me started on the habit back in the day with stacks of Scholastic Book Club paperbacks she stored for me at Beryl’s house.
Her house now, I guess. From my kitchen window, I peer out, but the studio looks empty.
Like me. Like my heart, which has no desires in it, no longings. I don’t care if I ever act again. The character who has so revived my career in recent years is languishing in a hospital in a coma, and as far as I’m concerned, she can go ahead and die, and I’ll be done with it, with the long hours and the constant pressure to look good, keep my weight down, be polite in interviews about things that don’t matter at all.
This ennui has been brewing for a while, honestly. My longtime partner, Dmitri, a Greek director who swept into my world when I was long past expectations of a partnership, died of COVID. Like everyone else I was shaken by the pandemic, and then Beryl died a year later. Phoebe and I fought viciously at the funeral, leaving yet another hole.
The doorbell, sudden and unexpected, makes me jump a foot. I rush to the door, hoping, and when I see Phoebe standing there in a soft pink jacket, with a loaf of sweet bread in her hands, my heart starts to beat again. I want to hug her, hard, rock back and forth, but an invisible wall keeps me from doing it. Our friendship is not where it was. My trust is not where it was. Even after the attack, our connection has been quite tenuous, mostly texts with a phone call here and there.
Still. “Phoebe. Come in.”
“I brought you some cranberry bread.”
“Yum. Come in the kitchen. I’ll make some tea.”
“That sounds good.” Her hair is cut in a straight line along her shoulder blades, dark brown still with only a few threads of white. She was always going to be thick in the hips and thighs, like Beryl, and time has proved that truth. This shadow shape makes me miss Beryl.