That was the year my mother became one of The Lost Girls-a television series about the misadventures of two orphaned teenagers, taken in by a schoolteacher couple.
The show was an instant hit, and my mother became a star at an age when she was too young to cope. It both made her and destroyed her because the show went off the air when she was nineteen and she hadn’t been successful at anything thereafter. Her acting never graduated to the next level; her marriage to my father, a few years later, didn’t work; eventually she became addicted to pills and alcohol. My father tried to get her help, but she bolted, taking me with her, hiding out in a miserable apartment on the Lower East Side.
We only lasted a year.
A few times she stopped drinking. For five or six days, she’d quit bringing home the men who scared me, start to smile more and even cook dinner. Those days were the best. But she never stayed sober long. Finally one night she took too many pills, washed them down with too much vodka and fell into a coma. At eight years old, I was the one who found her and called my father and asked him to come and save her.
He couldn’t. But he took me home with him and tried to save me. His second wife tried to help him, but it was Nina Butterfield, my mother’s oldest friend, who truly rescued me, who gave me the sheltering arms and unconditional love that kept me going.
I ran my finger over my mother’s long, wavy hair in a photograph taken when she was eighteen. She was lovely, with soft curls and those electric-blue eyes that looked so much like my daughter’s that sometimes I am still overwhelmed by missing my mother when gazing into my daughter’s face.
In that picture, at the height of her success, my mother looked like a real Hollywood actress. I wish I had known her then, at her happiest, when the bell-toned laugh that I had heard only infrequently was the sound she made the most often.
What was I looking for that night in the den? Something that would help me explain to Dulcie why, out of everything in the world, I could not allow her to follow in my own mother’s footsteps.
When the phone rang, I was almost relieved to put the album down and return to the present.
“Morgan?”
The voice was low and the syllables pulled like taffy. It was Noah Jordain.
“What are you doing?” he asked in that slow, southern drawl that brought to mind his fingers on my skin.
“Sitting here feeling sorry for myself.”
“Ruin another meal?”
“Very nice, very nice. No. I had some take-out soup. I bet you had something exotic you just whipped up for yourself in a minute and a half.”
“No, darling, not me, not tonight. I just got home. This is one crazy case. But I don’t want to talk about that now. I miss you.”
The words chilled and warmed me at the same time. He did this to me all the time. Affected me in a way that no one-not even my ex-husband-ever had.
“Morgan?”
“I’m here.”
“You got awfully quiet there. What were you thinking?”
“What awful things you see and I hear every day.”
“By hearing, by listening, you help people.”
“I know.”
“You sound too sad. What’s wrong?”
I told him about Dulcie’s invitation to audition for the TV series. I knew he’d understand. He’d watched us go through this the last time.
“I don’t like to automatically take your side, but she’s definitely too young to go off to Hollywood.”
“Thanks. The problem is how do I convince her of that?”
“Not sure you can.”
“So how long do I have to suffer her stony silence and nasty looks this time? You know how bad it was last time. I want her to fight it out with me, but she’s so stubborn. So much like my mother. She just freezes me out.”
“Need help thawing?” Noah asked.
I laughed.
“You know, it’s been almost three weeks since I’ve laid eyes on you.”
Something about the way his voice moved over the words “laid eyes on you” made me tremble. I felt a pull so strong it was almost painful, and then the sharp stab of fear followed. It always did. The red flag. The alarm. The warning. I wasn’t used to wanting someone. Or opening up. It made me vulnerable in a way I didn’t like.
I pushed myself to respond. “I miss you, too, Noah.” I heard the words louder in my ears than I’d uttered them.
“That’s good to hear, darling. That means you’ll say yes to what I’m going to ask you.”
“Yes.”
“You surprise me, Morgan, you know that? You don’t even know what I’m going to ask.”
“No, but I wanted to see what it would feel like to do that. Just take a chance. So, what did I agree to?”
“Spending this weekend with me if Dulcie is going to be at her father’s.”
“Well, you’re in luck. Or I am. Mitch is picking her up from the theater on Friday night and she’s not coming home until Monday. What are we doing?”
“You surprised me, I’ll surprise you. I’ll tell you on Friday night. But it’s still two days till then. What am I going to do in the meantime?” His voice was playful. “What if we just stay on the phone for the next three hours. Talk until we fall asleep, and then sleep with the phones by our faces,” he said.
“Men do not say things like that. You are entirely too romantic. It makes me suspicious.”
“It does not. It makes you giddy. I can tell from your voice. And men do say things like that. At least this one does.”
I was about to respond when I heard his cell phone ringing in the background. “Damn it, hold on.”
A call on his cell phone was almost always bad news, since he didn’t use it personally.
“That’s Perez. I’m sorry, Morgan, but I have to go. If I can, I’ll call you back later.”
“Take care of yourself,” I said, not quite sure he heard me as he hung up his phone.
Twenty
Dearest,
I miss you the most at night. Sometimes missing you is a
soft ache, but tonight it is like sharp spikes pushed into every joint of my body. Except now I have a goal that keeps me going-knowing that I am doing what has to be done. All five of them will be punished by your birthday. Sixteen days left. Sixteen. Sweet sixteen days. That allows me no room for mistakes, which is why I have to be invisible everywhere I go, in everything I do, even while I’m on the Internet. Invisible me. Visible women. Too visible. Too visible with all of themselves. There were other terrors, other weaknesses, other gross abuses and influences before the Internet, I know there was porn in magazines and X-rated movies and live theaters where women stripped down and danced naked while men sat behind glass walls in little booths and jerked off to prostitutes who cost money.
But these women are not limited to time and place: they fly, they spread their wings and more than their wings, and they are in front of ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand eyes at once, in living rooms and bedrooms and offices, all at the same time, talking, seducing, acting out, safe with their distance and yet dangerous with their reality.
Sometimes I sit in front of your computer and watch them and try to figure out exactly what it is about these others, these women, that makes them so addictive. I sit at your desk, fingers on the keys of your computer, and try to understand, and eventually the effort leads me back to you.
I miss you and I love you. How could you ever wonder about that? You. You. All I had and all that mattered-that ever mattered-was you. Did I tell you that? Did I tell you that I recorded Penny getting sick but have not watched it again? I don’t have the nerve. I have watched enough of her on that screen, playing with herself, the pain kicking in, taking her by surprise. Taking her by surprise the way you took me by surprise, and with pain that kicked in and kicks in. That is why she lost her place in her crude sex play, why she was naked and her body glistened with the perspiration that dripped down her neck like tears, down her breasts and her stomach until it reached her pubic hair, where it disappeared, why she was dizzy and her eyes couldn’t focus. She didn’t even know what to do to help herself by the time she doubled over and her skin had turned chalk white. Her nipples were erect and they stayed erect, by the way, the whole time she was sick, so that it even seemed like the drug had turned her on.