Most days, hope still felt foreign to me. Maybe that’s why I was so drawn to the meetings and the people who spoke so fervently and optimistically, despite their missing teeth and regrettable face tattoos and permanently damaged livers. One day, maybe all that hope would rub off on me, and my life would improve because of it.
After a stringy-haired folk music guitarist finished speaking (nineteen months sober, he’d just reconciled with his dying mother, which brought the room to tears), the meeting leader surveyed the rows of seats and caught my eye.
“Looks like we have someone new today. You interested in telling your story?”
I brushed cookie crumbs from my jeans and stood.
“Hi, I’m Sam.” I looked out at the group, who gazed back at me with mild curiosity. Mostly middle-aged and life-worn, per usual; but Santa Barbara’s conservative affluence made for a more clean-cut group of addicts than your average Hollywood AA meeting. In the second row, a blue-eyed man about my age stared at me keenly through tortoiseshell glasses. He was nondescript, just a wiry guy in a plain white T-shirt, although his curly hair was choppy and uneven, as if he’d cut it himself in the mirror with a pair of garden shears. He smiled encouragingly at me.
“I’m three-hundred-seventy-nine days sober and I’m in town visiting my parents for a few days. I’m not going to go into my long and sordid history here today—I’ve done that plenty at my regular meeting in Los Angeles. I’ll just say that I’m aware that staying with them is a trigger. My mother—” I didn’t even have to finish the sentence as heads around me started to nod vigorously.
“I haven’t actually slept under the same roof as my parents in about five years and it’s making me think a lot about my childhood. Wondering where things went so wrong, you know?” More nodding. “Anyway. Maybe it’s not such a great idea for me to be here, dwelling on all this. But the thing is—my parents asked me to come and help them out with something, and that’s the first time they’ve done that in…decades? And so, even though I know that stepping out of my regular routine in Los Angeles is a recipe for falling off the wagon, I’m trying to hold on to this: that my family is counting on me for once. And I’m not going to let them down.”
I took my seat again and let the applause wash over me. That little hit of dopamine that I got from public approval—the same lift of joy that I’d chased all those years as an actress, and then later tried to replicate with a shot of vodka or a line of coke—was the other thing that kept me coming to these meetings and standing up to speak.
I’d lost a lot, but I had this, at least; this, and caffeine; so I sipped at my second cup of watery Nespresso and smiled happily at the faces that smiled back at me.
* * *
—
After the last speaker had finished and we’d folded up all the chairs and moved them against the wall, the tortoiseshell-glasses man found me. Up close, he was more attractive than I’d first thought. He looked like a character from a movie about a midcentury boys’ boarding school: the kid who’s the beleaguered misfit but grows into his body and returns triumphantly to his high school reunion as a bestselling novelist.
There was something about him that compelled me despite myself, something about the deep lines around his eyes, the wiry muscles under his T-shirt, and the flush of a tan that suggested he spent a lot of time running on the beach. He held out a hand for me to shake and I grasped it without thinking, finding his grip pleasantly strong.
“Sam Logan, right?”
I braced myself. Fifteen years after On the Double was canceled, I still got recognized on occasion, but it was usually only by obsessives and oddballs, people who had encyclopedic knowledge of vintage television or who spent a lot of time on Reddit. Sometimes I’d get a sharp-eyed young woman with a good memory of her childhood idols. The men who recognized me were typically the worst: Often it was because they’d fetishized my sister and me as teens, masturbating to our Nickelodeon sitcom. Now they wanted to fuck me just so they could tell their friends, Hey, remember that actress from that old show about the twins? She gave me a blow job. Boy, she really screwed up her life.
I quickly released his hand and stepped backward, hitting the wall with my sneaker. There was no escape.
“Caleb!” he went on, triumphantly. His eyes searched mine behind his glasses, looking for something that he clearly didn’t find, because his expression of excitement began to fade. “Oh shit, you don’t remember me, do you?”
I paused. “Should I?”
“Caleb Stowe. We were in class together, back in grammar school.” I stared at him, looking for something that I might remember, but could dredge up nothing. Or wait, there was a whisper: a heavyset kid with coke-bottle glasses and lashes so long that they pressed against the lenses. Was that him? “Now that I think of it, there’s no reason you’d remember me. I mean, I remember you because you got famous and that really ingrained you in my memories, obviously. But why would you remember me?” His face was turning pink, and I could tell that he wanted to quit talking but couldn’t quite stop himself. “You kicked me in the shin on the school playground once. Said I was a bully because I wouldn’t give up the swing to your sister after she’d been waiting for her turn. And you were right, you know? I was being a selfish dick. I always remembered that later, when I saw you on TV. Anyway, I’m sorry to babble on like this. I’m not a freak or a stalker, I promise. I just wanted to say hi.”
“Hi,” I said. The moment grew awkward, and I could tell that he was looking for an escape. I took pity on him. “I’m sorry I don’t remember you, but you know. I did a lot of drugs. Which probably doesn’t come as a surprise because I’m here.”
He laughed at this and nodded, running a hand through his hair; and then he got a funny expression on his face as he felt something there he didn’t expect. “Oh God, and I look like a crazy person today, too. I let my daughter give me a haircut, and I haven’t had a chance to go to the barber to get it evened up yet.”
“Oh yeah?” I felt myself perking up. “How old is your daughter?”
“Seven.”
“You let a seven-year-old give you a haircut? Are they even allowed to hold scissors at that age?”
He shrugged. “Sometimes you do things that seem crazy just to give your kid a yes instead of a no. I figured no matter how bad it was going to look, it was still something that I’d be able to fix. And she really wanted to do it.”
Suddenly I liked this guy, Caleb, with his wonky haircut and his tendency to overshare and his willingness to do stupid things to make his kid happy. “You know a lot about kids, huh?”
“I know a lot about one kid, but sure. If that counts?” He smiled nervously at me. “Why, you have a kid of your own?”
“No,” I said. “But I’m borrowing one for the time being and could probably use some childcare advice.”
He put his hands on his hips and thrust his chest forward a bit, an exaggerated swagger of confidence that I suspected was intended to redeem himself from his earlier fumbling. “Well, I’m your guy,” he said. “Just let me know how I can help.”
7
A TERRIBLE SOUND SPLIT my sleep apart, shattering the pleasant void into a thousand nerve-jangling pieces. I lay in the dark, disoriented, as it came again: a wail of utter despair. Was it a dying junkie, a betrayed girlfriend, the victim of a car accident down on Hollywood Boulevard?
My nose registered the soft must of an unfamiliar comforter, and everything suddenly came back to me: I was at my parents’ house. Charlotte was asleep on the other side of the wall. Or, rather, she wasn’t asleep anymore. Either something horrific had just happened to her or I was hearing the primal howl of a little girl who no longer wanted to be in bed.