The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (6 page)

We got to the Santa Monica Police Department to find a swarm of paps waiting outside. You could always tell them from regular people: they were the ones chain-smoking and knocking back Red Bulls with pissed-off expressions on their faces as if they still hadn’t gotten over the fact that they had been chosen last for volleyball in gym class in fifth grade, and that’s why they had devoted their lives to making other people’s lives hell. When they got a look at Ben’s shiny BMW 750, they came to attention like soldiers. Well, if soldiers were doughy and in serious need of some sun and vegetables.

“Annabelle,” he said, putting his hand on my arm as I started to open the door.

I turned. “Yeah?” My voice sounded garbled and far away, as if it were coming via an underwater speaker in a very deep pool.

“It’s going to be okay. I promise.”

Although Ben was pretty much the only person I knew who consistently made good on his promises, it was hard to believe him on this one. “Sure,” I replied rather unsurely.

Something about the way he squeezed my arm made my eyes fill with tears, which I quickly put a stop to by biting the inside of my lip. I knew if I let myself start crying, there was a chance I might not stop. As I opened the car door I was gunned down by the
click-click-click
of their cameras. Growing up with a famous mom meant that I had perfected my blank stare when it came to this stuff years ago. It was just the right amount of I’m-just-going-to-ignore-you without being too bitchy and verging into you-guys-are-the-scum-of-the-earth territory. (Which they were. One time one tried to get into the examining room when Mom was having her gynecological checkup.)

“Annabelle! Over here!”

“Annabelle, how does it feel to have to come bail your mom out of jail in the middle of the night?”

“Annabelle, do you think this is because her career has totally tanked since she left the show, or was she always a lush?”

Okay, that was just wrong. As much as I tried to follow my
Thou shalt not look paps in the eye
mantra, I turned to see which one had asked that last question. Just in time to see Ben pull up all five feet eleven of himself as if he was going to take a swing at the guy.

Despite the fact that he drove a fancy car and lived in a million-dollar, famous-architect-designed house, Ben was a hippie at heart. He was Buddhist Lite and not into violence, but when people said mean things about Mom, something kicked in and he got all macho. “Just ignore them,” I murmured, pushing our way through the crowd. He settled down, and we walked through the doors of the police station.

Each flash of the paps’ cameras was a reminder that the truth about my mother—the one that I had tried so hard to hide—was about to become public.

I was about to go back to the bathroom for another round of Play-Doh huffing a while later when a thirtyish woman with blonde cornrows wearing a leopard-print halter top smiled at me. She would have been pretty if it weren’t for the pockmarks on her face. And if she got her chipped tooth fixed. And if she lost the black liquid eyeliner. But she did have a nice nose.

“Cute top,” she said.

“Thanks,” I replied. “I, uh, like yours, too.” It wasn’t really my style, but it felt like the right thing to say during a chat in the waiting room of a police station while talking to a woman who may or may not have been a hooker.

She smiled big, showing a few more chipped teeth. “Yeah? I got it at Marshalls. In Chatsworth. I only got it, like, a few weeks ago, so there might be some left.”

Chatsworth was deep in the San Fernando Valley. It was also the capital of the porn industry, a fact I had heard on the news the other night. “Great. I’ll try and swing by there and pick one up,” I replied, probably a little too enthusiastically.

She leaned in closer to me. As she did, I saw that she had a tattoo of a pentagram on the back of her right shoulder. Maybe she wasn’t a hooker but a witch. “Personally, I like T.J. Maxx a lot better, but what are you gonna do, right? I mean, every single Marshalls—they all have this . . .
smell
.”

“I know what you mean,” I agreed. Actually, I didn’t, but I was hoping that if I agreed with her she’d go back to her
People
so I could start surfing the top gossip sites to see what they were saying about Mom’s arrest. After she didn’t say anything for what seemed like a safe amount of time, I went back to my iPhone.

“Like a hospital, right?”

I looked up again. “Huh?”

“All the Marshalls. They smell like hospitals,” she replied. “Or old age homes. But not T.J. Maxx. They smell like . . . one of those scented candles.”

I couldn’t believe I was having a conversation about the smell of different discount-clothing stores at five o’clock in the morning while the guy I wished was my father bailed my mother out of jail. Although that would definitely win me some sort of Most Original Facebook Status Update award.

As she put her
People
into her purse and settled back in her chair, I knew I was in trouble. “So who you here to get?” she asked. “Boyfriend?”

As I shook my head, the sleeping guy let out another snore and some more drool.

“That’s who I’m here to get,” she said. “Actually, he’s my fiancé. We haven’t gotten around to getting the ring yet, but we’re going to. They’re just so expensive, right?”

I nodded. As much as I was dying to know why the fiancé had been arrested, I didn’t dare ask, afraid it would be a very long answer.

She pointed at Ben at the window, who, after signing a bunch of forms, was now on the phone. “That your dad?”

I shook my head.

“Oh. So
he’s
your boyfriend.”

Okay, I was definitely not in Kansas anymore. Ben was twenty years older than I was. In L.A. you saw that a lot but not with, like,
teenagers
. “Uh, no. I’m here for my—”

Before I could finish, the door opened, and Mom came
click-clacking
out. Her steps were a little more wobbly than usual, but she still walked better in heels drunk than most people did sober. Her hair was a bit mussed up, her blue eyes were a little bloodshot, and her eyeliner was smeared, but other than that she looked fine.

“Omigod—that lady looks just like that actress!” my new friend gasped. “The one who used to be really famous! From that TV show . . . the
Friends
rip-off . . . what’s it called?”

“
Plus Zero
,” the African American woman offered.

The cornrowed T.J. Maxx fan nodded. “Right. Right.”

When Mom saw me, she slowed, and her flawless posture—the posture she had perfected by doing the old-school-walking-with-a-book-on-her-head—disappeared. Her shoulders slumped, her face bloomed with sadness and regret and guilt and all the other stuff that I sometimes saw on it when she hadn’t closed her bedroom door entirely at night and I peeked through the crack. Or when she was standing at the sliding glass door that led to the backyard, staring out at the pool as she smoked a cigarette and blew the smoke outside, because in her mind, if she did that, she wasn’t really smoking.

It sounded warped, but it actually made me happy to see my mother like that. Not because I wanted her to be miserable, but because it was honest and true and not an act. The times I loved Mom best were when she wasn’t overly happy or overly beautiful. I loved her when she was human, because it made me feel as if it was okay for me to be human, too.

But then, in a split second, she put her (former) superstar face back on, threw her shoulders back, and continued
click-clacking
toward me. When she reached me she pulled me into a hug.

“Omigod, it
is
her!” I heard the woman gasp.

“Yup. You’re right. I recognize the walk,” the now-awake Hispanic hottie agreed.

“Oh, Bug. I guess I kind of screwed up, huh?” she said into my ear.

Kind of?
“I don’t know, Mom. You think?” I said, unable to keep the anger out of my voice.

I felt her stiffen. “You don’t have to be so
hostile
,” she said, hurt.

Before I could reply, I heard the familiar click of an iPhone camera.

With the money she could get selling that to one of the tabloids, my new friend would be able to buy everything in T.J. Maxx.

As the two of us let go of each other, Mom ran a hand through her hair. “You don’t have a mirror by any chance, do you?” she asked me.

“Are you serious?”

“I’m a huge fan,” the cornrowed woman gushed to Mom.

Mom smiled big. “Oh, that’s so sweet! Thank you so much!”

“Do you think I could get a picture with you?” she asked. “’Cause no one’s gonna believe me when I tell them I met you.”

“I don’t see why not,” Mom said.

Ben and I looked at each other. Maybe on a normal day the fact that Mom was posing for pictures with fans in the middle of a police station at 5:00 a.m. after having been arrested would have seemed completely insane, but because this wasn’t a normal day, it just seemed par for the course.

The woman handed the phone to Ben. “Would you mind?”

As Mom posed, I plopped down on the chair and did a Google search of her name to see what came up.

I cringed when I saw the first result. “Oh, no.”

Ben looked over. “What is it?”

“Simon,” I sighed. Simon was Simon Sweet, a blogger whose real name was Edwin Machado. Despite the fact that he was only twenty-eight, Simon had almost as much filler in his cheeks as Mom did. Who would’ve thought that not answering some dorky fan’s e-mail with his request for an autograph all those years ago would have resulted in his remade self gleefully dragging Mom through the mud of cyberspace after her life imploded? Apparently, Simon was not great at letting things go because whenever he could write something snarky about Mom or print unflattering photos, he did.

Mom took her arm away from the woman’s shoulder and reached for my iPhone. “Give me that.” She held the screen up close to her face. “
What . . . ?
She squinted. “I can’t see this without my glasses,” she said as she handed it back to me. “Can you read it to me, Bug?”

I looked at it and cringed. “How about if I read it to you in the car?”

“No, I want to hear it now.”

“Mom, I don’t think this is—”

“Annabelle. Read it.”

I sighed. “Okay. ‘SIMON SEZZ. . . . What former sitcom queen who hasn’t been able to get arrested finally
did
 . . . driving the wrong way on the PCH at two a.m.? According to the police report, Ms. Washed Up and Has Been drank a little too much vino. . . . like, say, three times the legal limit. And from the mug shots that are about to be released, it appears that someone’s been skimping on the highlights.’”

Mom was so mad some lines popped up on her forehead, which, given the amount of Botox that had built up over the years, was close to a miracle. “First of all? It was not two a.m.—it was three. And I was drinking vodka, not wine. And I was only two-point-nine-eight times over the legal limit.”

“I don’t know what that Simon person is smoking, talking trash about your hair,” the cornrowed woman said. “’Cause I think it looks great.”

“Thank you,” Mom said.

She had been trying to get it done for about a month, but ever since Miki, her hairdresser, had gotten his own show on Bravo, he was now more famous than she was and had trouble fitting her in even though she had been his first celebrity client.

Ben walked over to the door and peered outside. “Janie, we need to go. There’s a ton of paps out there.”

She turned to the woman. “You wouldn’t happen to have a mirror, would you?”

I grabbed Mom’s arm. “Mom, come on.”

“Okay, okay.” She looked me over and pulled out a lipstick from her bag. “Bug, you look pale. Just put a bit of this on, will you?”

“You’re insane,” I said, shaking my head as I pulled her toward the entrance.

“You ready?” Ben asked me before he opened the door.

“Do we have a choice?”

“Nope.”

“Then, sure. Why not?” I replied.

CHAPTER THREE

I spent my sixteenth birthday in rehab.

Well, visiting Mom in rehab. She hadn’t wanted to go (“Rehab is for people who have a
serious
drinking or drug problem,” she kept saying. “Not someone like me who has a drink once in a while to unwind.”) Ben, her agent Carrie, and her publicist Jared thought it was a good idea. (“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Jared said during the Team Janie meeting at our house the morning after the arrest, “but I’m thinking we might be able to get you a book deal for a memoir out of this. Or at least a column in Oprah’s magazine.”)

So two days, countless snarky blog posts underneath Mom’s mug shot, and a very unflattering photo of me taken by the T.J. Maxx lady making the rounds on the Internet later, Ben arranged for Esme, our housekeeper, to stay with me during Mom’s time away, and he drove her down to Oasis, a “full-care facility for the recovery of mind, body, and spirit” (read: fancy way to say rehab). He took her when I was at school. More specifically, while I sat in class trying to focus on the trig quiz in front of me. Fully aware that no one else in class was focusing because they were sneaking looks at me to see if I’d end up losing it like Lara Newberry (the Daughter Of a stand-up-comedian-turned-movie-star) had the day after
her
mother had been shipped off there. (“All I can tell you is when you go for Family Weekend,” she told me in the bathroom, “make sure you go hungry, because the food in the dining hall there is awesome. Totally organic. And because alcoholics crave sugar when they’re detoxing, the dessert and snack selection is super-great.”)

I may have looked as if I was keeping it together on the outside, but inside was a different story. That following Wednesday, before joining my friends in the cafeteria, I stopped in the bathroom. Luckily, I was close to the nice one—the one that they had just redone over spring break so that it no longer smelled all vomit-y. (Private school for girls = beaucoup de bulimia.) Once in, I went to the handicapped stall and managed to plop down on the toilet and grab on to the metal rail before my heart started to pound so hard it felt as if it was going to come through my throat.