And here, in the middle of all of her chaos, is her nephew, who wantsto be nowhere else in the world. She should thank Al, really, for creating a plan that backfired so spectacularly. That’s the thing about kids: tell them they can’t have something, and they’ll never want anything else.
“Where are they?”
Sebastian smells his father before he sees him, or at least the fruits of his labor. Chicken breasts sizzling on the stovetop, an onion roughly chopped. Al is bathed in the smoke of it, a dishcloth thrown over his shoulder, his fogged glasses pushed up on top of his head. Stray capers. A gutted lemon.
“My day was great, thanks,” Al says. “How have you been?”
“Where are Mom’s videotapes?”
Al takes his glasses, rubs them with the dishcloth, places them back on his nose. He looks at Sebastian. His face is blank.
“The tapes that Sadie gave you? After the funeral? She said there were a hundred?”
“I don’t have them.”
“You don’t have them?”
The chicken sizzles. Lola sticks her head in and asks, “Can I help?” No one responds.
“I gave them away,” Al says.
“You gave them away?”
“What are we talking about?” Lola asks.
“Tapes. Of Mom.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d be interested.”
“You didn’t think we’d be interested? Jesus, Dad, aren’t you supposed to be a historian? Aren’t you supposed to preserve things?”
“I don’t think it’s how she wanted you to see her.”
Lola raises her eyebrows and her hands and skitters out of the room. Like this doesn’t involve her too. Sebastian’s voice is pumping in his chest.
“You gave them away. To where? To who?”
“I don’t remember, Seb. I’m sorry. It was a long time ago.”
“I don’t believe you.”
His father looks like he has been punched.
After that, Sebastian does not speak. He has no words. He waits for his plate and carries it up to his room. His mind rolls over everything his father has ever claimed about their mother. The Christmas presents, the moments she was around, moments he cannot remember, her happiness, here in this shitty little nothing town. He hid her career. He hid her sister. He hid her life.
Maybe he just couldn’t stand that she existed beyond him. That she had any success outside his narrow little world of Founding Fathers and ancient documents and bone-dry essays that nobody reads. Maybe she showed him how little it mattered, trying to become Asshole Emeritus, all those patronizing nerds in turtlenecks. Or maybe there is something else, something more damning. Either way, Sebastian is going to find out.
In the morning he begs off school again. Ankle-related reasons. His father, who normally wouldn’t tolerate this bullshit, says only: “If you must.” Lola looks at him like she wants to say something but doesn’t dare. When they leave, he makes a mug of instant coffee and disinters his mother’s scripts.
On the living room floor, he spreads them apart, arranges them chronologically. He follows his mother’s movements through the dialogue, the marginalia. When she was pushed out of a taxi, she wrote: That asshole on Melrose Ave! And when she was nursing a child and crying to herself, she wrote: Sebastian, week three.That’s him!
Everywhere, she’s written names, none of which have to do with any of the characters. Women’s names, but also men’s: Rip. Mark. Glen. Orson—Orson Grey!What could it mean? Clearly, she was drawing from life, using the texture of California to inform Margie—fearless and reckless, good with being bad, taking whatever (whoever!) she wanted. The thought was a profound relief; that she had not spent all her short hours in his father’s captivity, that she had experienced life in all its freedom and enormity, that she had maybe even loved other people.Margie, Susan, Susan, Margie, blurring into a single force of nature. His mother was an artist, a bombshell, a woman with the world in her hand. He turns another page.Ali. Richard.
Is she trying to tell him something?
This would all make more sense if he could see her in action. Or smoke a joint. But given he’ll have to wait to score until school is out, he wanders to the kitchen, opens the drinks cabinet, and sniffs an ancient bottle of Madeira. He could get drunk. He will get drunk. He is still only coming to understand the fluid fearlessness of alcohol, the way it moves through his body, clamoring for the arriving moment:Now!He pours his coffee into the sink and fills the mug with a heavy dollop. It tastes sweet and rotten and good.
The scripts paper the entire carpet, and as he meditates on the scale of them, an anger builds. Somehow, the most offensive thing is his father’s insistence that she left no trace. Isn’t that the point of being an artist—to leave a mark? He replays the conversation yesterday, Sadie’s anguished hands running through her bangs over and over again. “Lots of people taped it,” she moaned. “I just never made copies.”
