***
CHAPTER NINE
ELIAS
I drove through town on the way to my house, down along Main Street, passing the little coffee shop, and the ice cream parlor, and the stores that sold all kinds of country knickknacks. West Bend was the kind of small town you see in movies, with a downtown that looked like it had been transplanted straight out of the fifties. By all appearances, it was a quaint little place, the kind of place where nothing bad happened. If you were just visiting West Bend, one of the tourists who came through during winter ski season, that's definitely the impression you would get.
That's what River thought, I knew that much. I could see the expression on her face, when we were driving out here, and then pulling up to the bed and breakfast.
Of course, a visitor didn't know West Bend like I did. A visitor had no history here, the kind of history that comes from growing up in a place where your brother did what mine did. A place where your parents were who mine were.
A place where you were a fucking pariah.
Memory never fades, not in a small town like this. Your sins only become more amplified, cautionary tales passed down from generation to generation.
We lived on the outskirts of town, on a couple of acres my father had purchased before the town was the size it was now. Size it is now was really an exaggeration. There were maybe a couple thousand people in West Bend. But when I was younger, it was even smaller. Even more closed off and closed minded.
There were some more stores and more rich people with second homes here, and more tourists coming down here during ski season, but the town hadn't changed all that much. At least not out where my family's house was. Out there, out on the edges of town, it was still folks eking out whatever kind of existence they could. Out there, it was people like my father, who owned a tiny patch of dirt and worked the land for whatever they could get from it. It was the way he had done with the coal mine on our property.
People think of coal mines as these big places run by mining companies. But the truth is, there's people who, at least when I was a kid, got away with mining on their own property. It was kind of like bootlegging, almost – except legal. My father had the permit he needed when we were kids, and it wasn't some complicated operation. It was pretty straightforward – him putting blasting caps on the side of the mountain on our property, blasting away a little bit at a time. He sold coal the way that people sell firewood, this business that provided us just barely enough to scratch out an existence.
And then he drank away most of what he earned, came home angry, ready to lay into whoever crossed him.
Then the shit happened with Silas - the trouble with the explosives, when he set them off unauthorized and my father lost that mining permit - and there was no more mining. My father became a janitor in our high school.
Then we were the kids of the drunk high school janitor.
To say I was happy to leave West Bend was a fucking understatement.
I was running from West Bend full throttle as soon as I could get gone.
It’s funny the way life works. Things always come round full circle when you least expect them to. I swore to everything I believed in that I’d never come back here again. The one time I returned, to make sure my brother Silas wasn't fucking dead, only confirmed that I needed to stay the hell away from this place.
Ahead of me, the house stood in stark contrast to the houses I’d passed on the way out of town. My parents hadn’t kept up with the repairs, I could tell that much, although I guessed the repairs on the piece of shit would have been more than the house was worth. It hadn’t been a nice place when I was growing up, and it was even less of a nice place now.
A dog wandered up to the car. I wasn’t sure if it was a stray or not.
The door to the house opened and a figure stood in the frame, shadowed by the overhang of the doorway in the mid-afternoon light. She shielded her eyes from the sun, but I could see her squinting at me. She stepped outside, wearing a satin bathrobe and heeled slippers, rollers in her hair, waving at the dog. “Get away from the car and leave him be, you mangy mutt.”
I opened the door and stepped out, and the dog slinked away into the yard. “Hi, Mom,” I said.
***
“Is that him?” I asked.
My mother lit a cigarette, blew smoke through the kitchen before she answered. She played with the book of matches on the kitchen table, then pulled her satin robe tighter around her before she answered. “That’s him,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do with him so I left him there.”
“Flushing him would work,” I said. I didn’t like the idea of him sitting there in an urn on the mantle, like he was watching over us or something. As if he was some kind of beloved father figure.
“Elias, you don’t mean that,” she said. She crossed her feet, dangled the kitten slipper with the furry pom-pom on top off the end of her toe. My mother was stuck somewhere in the fifties, in many ways, the least of which involved her wardrobe. “It’s unchristian to speak of the dead like that.”
I wasn’t able to stifle the laugh, the sound bitter. “Well, it was unchristian for him to be a worthless drunk and child-beater.”
“Your father had his own demons, Elias,” she said. “Someday you’ll understand that.”
“I doubt it.” That much was true. I’d never understand why my father was who he was, cold and callous when he wasn’t drunk, worse than that when he was.
And I’d never understand why the hell my mother stayed, so wrapped up in a blanket of denial she was rarely aware of the horror under her own nose.
She smoked, but she didn’t drink or drug; at least there was that. My mother’s vice was religion. She clung to it like a drug. Before she had us, she was a wild child, partying and out of control, at least according to the stories she told us. That’s when she had my oldest brother, the one who caused all of the trouble, who changed the course of our lives in this town. She was sixteen when he was born. She became staunchly religious, but not any particular brand of religion. She incorporated bits and pieces of things she’d come across, then vehemently claim them as her own- Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, it didn’t matter.
My three brothers and I came much later, after she’d married our father.
Abraham Saint.
Growing up, she’d tell us that she knew it was her destiny when she met him- his name gave it away. It was a sign from God that she'd come across this man with the religious name.
The truth was, it was just the opposite. He wasn’t a gift from God. He was a curse.
But she’d persisted, kept on believing. She gave us the names of saints, in some misguided notion that naming us after saints would somehow protect us. My mother was perpetually naive.
The drumming of her nails on the table shook me from my thoughts.
“Elias,” she said, covering my hand with hers. She smiled sadly, her face pale even underneath the carefully applied makeup. She was always a beautiful woman, and still was now, even after the years of my father’s bullshit. “Will you stay? The house is so empty since he’s been gone.”
My mother was never good at being on her own. She was one of those people who were only people in the presence of others, who somehow ceased to exist when they were on their own. Her expression was childlike in its intensity, and I couldn't help but feel sorry for her. "For a little while, mom."
The truth was, I wasn't sure how long I was going to stay in West Bend, or what I was going to do. I was running, but I didn't know where I was running to.
She nodded. "A little while is good," she said. She was silent for a moment before she finally spoke. "Your leg- how is it?"
"It's okay, mom," I said. It was an uncharacteristically direct question, coming from my mother. She'd acknowledged my injury only once, after it happened, on the phone. She hadn't come to see me in the hospital, but I also hadn't expected that.
"Does it hurt?"
"Now?" I shook my head. "Sometimes, I mean
. I get phantom pain."
"But it looks, you know, normal now."
I nodded. "The prosthetic is good," I said. "This one is pretty realistic. I have another one for running."
"I was going to come visit you." My mother leaned back in her chair, her eyes focused on the wall behind me. She lit another cigarette, her hands trembling as she fumbled with the lighter. When she spoke, her voice faltered. "I couldn't - I just didn't want to see you like that."
"It's okay, mom," I said. For all her inadequacies, I had a hard time being angry with her. It was like being angry with a child.
"Have you seen Silas yet?" she asked.
"Nope." I hadn't seen my twin brother in three years, since I'd come back to West Bend to visit, thinking things might have changed, that after two years away, people might be different. But people don't change.
And family? They change least of all.
"I don't know what happened with you two," she said. "But you need to see him, Elias. Things weren't right with him before, but he's in a bad way now, since he came back from Vegas."
It was like hearing my mother speak in a foreign language, the way she was acknowledging that my brother was in some kind of trouble. This- being direct, honest- was not something she did. Maybe my father's death had shaken something inside her.
"Promise me you'll go see him, Elias," she said, her voice pleading.
"Yeah, mom," I said. "I'll go see him." But that didn't mean anything. That whole blood is thicker than water thing? That was such a bunch of bullshit, I thought. Silas and I, we'd been tight once, but that was a long time ago.
***
CHAPTER TEN
RIVER
The tick-tick-tick of the antique clock on the bedside table was starting to get under my skin. I rolled over on my side to look at the clock. Shit. It was only 7:30. I had a whole night ahead of me in an empty house. June and her little boy had gone back over to the ranch house on the opposite side of the meadow, leaving me to entertain myself.
I should be happy with this, I told myself.
Quiet was something I should like. It was something I never got enough of. For the longest time, it was something I craved, surrounded by the noise of Hollywood and all of the craziness of my life. Now, though, stuck here in this house alone with my memories, it was positively suffocating.
That’s the thing about running from the past- when you stop, even for just a moment, trying to catch your breath, that’s when you’re the most vulnerable. It’s when the past rears its ugly head and lets you know you’re foolish to think you can ever get away from it. Instead, you’re forever tethered to it.
***
I stepped out of the car. The limo driver averted his eyes, quickly returning to his post and speeding away, leaving me to walk into the lobby of the apartment building alone.
The doorman took me by the elbow as I stumbled through the door. “Ms. Andrews, are you okay?”
I shook my head, mumbled a barely coherent response. “I’m fine.”
I wasn’t fine. I was fifteen, returning from my twenty-four year old costar’s house at four in the morning, barely able to walk.
The doorman gestured to one of the bellman to take me up to my apartment. He was silent, looking straight ahead during the elevator ride. Maintaining an air of professionalism.
But I knew he really wanted to take my picture, sell it to the tabloids.
At the door to our apartment - my apartment, the one I paid for, where I housed my sisters and my shitty excuse for a mother - he paused. “Is your mother home?” he asked, trying the doorknob.
I laughed, but there was no mirth in it. “Who the fuck knows?”
Then I leaned over and vomited into the decorative urn near the doorway. At some point, my mother opened the front door and shooed the bellman away, hissing a threat to have him fired if he were to tell anyone what he saw.
She looked me over, her eyes trailing up the length of my body, taking in my torn shirt, my smeared makeup and my mussed hair. Her eyes narrowed. “What the hell happened to you?”
“I was at Jason’s.” I pushed past her into the hallway, kicking off my heels. I just wanted to go to bed. I was going to be sick again, I knew it. And I was going to break down. I didn’t want to do it in front of her. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of seeing me cry.
But she followed me, back toward my bedroom, her barrage of accusations masquerading as questions ringing through the air between us. “Masterson? Your co-star?”
“Is there any other?” There wasn’t. He was it. That movie would end up being my big break. It was one of those roles that you take, excitement in your belly even as a teenager, because you understand the significance of what you're about to do. What I’d done up until then was nothing. This was it. It was my big chance. Jason Masterson was the man of the hour. He was hot - not just physically, but in the industry. And I’d gotten this role, despite my age and the fact that, even a couple years after being discovered, I was still a new actress when it came down to it.
So when my co-star asked me to a party at his house, turning him down would have been a huge mistake.
Even when it turned out that the only person he’d invited to our little party was me. And after I’d drank a couple of beers to take the edge off, taken a few tokes, he’d given me something else. Said it was ecstasy. I’d never taken ecstasy, but I knew it was important to be friendly with Jason. And I wanted to belong. He belonged here in Hollywood, and I was the new girl on the block.
I didn’t want to go back to living in that trailer park.
So I took what he offered.
It wasn’t ecstasy.
“What the hell did you do?” my mother asked.
I whirled around. "What did I do?" I practically spit the words at her. "I went to Jason's house, mom. What the hell did you think I did?"
She turned, walking toward the living room. "You smell like shit," she said. I watched her light a cigarette, and blow the smoke through the room, and I felt my face flush hot, my blood boiling. Walking over to her, I took it from her fingers and put it out on the side of her brand new Chanel bag.
The one I'd paid for.
"I keep telling you," I said. "Stop fucking smoking in the apartment. I don't care if you kill yourself, but Brenna? She doesn't need to breathe it in secondhand."
She looked at me, eyes filled with hatred.
I thought she was going to slap me for ruining her purse, but she didn't.
One of my first memories was of my mother's face, inches away from mine, screwed up into this mask of rage. I remember thinking, even then, that she hated me.
Now that I was older, I knew it was true. She hated Brenna and I. She was never meant to be a mother.
"I hope you made it worth his while," she said, "Although I don't know why a man that hot would be interested in someone like you. He's the next Brad Pitt. And you're River Gilstead, remember that- you might have a new last name, but you'll always be a Gilstead. You'd spread your legs for any white trash piece of shit that asked you to."
"Worth his while?" I said, the heat in my face almost unbearable. "He gave me something and screwed me while I was passed out. I woke up with my pants off on the floor of his living room. Then he had his driver send me home. So if that's what you mean by worth his while, then I guess it probably was."
She stared at me, silent, and for a moment I almost expected her to express some tenderness for me, to reach out and draw me in tight to her chest, to speak to me the way a mother would, to tell me everything was going to be all right. She would know what to do. She would take me out of this, away from the unrelenting pressure and the overwhelming responsibilities. Away from the men who looked at me like I was an adult.
Then she grabbed my wrist, brought her face close to mine, and looked at me the same way she'd looked at me when I was a child. With a mixture of contempt and envy. "You don't ruin everything for us," she hissed. "You hear me, River Gilstead? You'd best not have any bright
ideas about what you're going to do about this."
I wrenched my arm from her grasp. “Ruin everything for us?” I