Some Kind of Miracle (20 page)

“Sunny, get out of here and go to your room,” Dahlia said through clenched teeth. Danny was out of the bed now, pulling on his clothes from the floor and hurrying into them like a character in a bedroom comedy who’s just been caught with the wrong woman.

“She’s my cousin,” Dahlia said. “I’m taking care of her. She’s got problems.”

Danny smiled a forced smile and tried to avert his eyes from Sunny’s nakedness. He was partly dressed, and a very bright morning sun was pouring in through the bedroom window. That was probably why he chose that moment to put on his mirrored sunglasses. As he did, Sunny looked into them, saw her reflection, and let out what sounded like a war whoop as she lunged for Danny.

“Get out of this house! We know what you want and what you’re doing! You’re the devil!” she screamed as she tore the glasses from his terrified face. Then she snapped them in half and threw them at the wall as Danny ran for the front door. In a minute Dahlia could hear his car start and hear Sunny laughing
wildly as she ran into her room and slammed the door behind her.

“Sunny!” Dahlia screamed so hard it made her throat hurt. “Goddamn it, that’s the end! I am giving you two choices, and here they are.” Dahlia wrapped herself in the top sheet and, holding it around herself, headed for Sunny’s room. “You are either going to start taking the pills from Joe Diamond right away—and I will personally stand there and watch you put those little suckers in your mouth and check with a dental probe to make sure you’re not storing the things in your cheeks like Rose, the fucking squirrel, who I hope is not carrying bubonic plague, which is something I recently read ground squirrels can do-or you are going back to the Sea View or some other facility where if you don’t take the pills nobody gives a shit!”

The last was said with a barefoot kick to the partially open door to Sunny’s room. To which, when she saw it now, Dahlia realized she hadn’t paid a visit in a very long time, because it must have taken ages for Sunny to create what was there. Every large surface—the ceiling, the floor, and all of the walls—was covered with pictures cut out of magazines of the faces of beautiful women. Glossy shots of movie stars, models, high-profile actresses torn from the pages of Seth’s magazines, taped, glued, and pushpinned everywhere.

“Movie stars, models, and princesses,” Sunny said, following Dahlia’s gaze. “Those on that wall are the dead ones. Princess Di, Marilyn Monroe, Grace of
Monaco, Selena, Natalie Wood. And that whole wall over there is covered with ones who are in the most danger as we speak. Gwyneth, Courtney, Jennifer Aniston. Now do you understand why Dolores Hart became a nun? And why I let myself go? And why I always do my own hair? Because the hairdressers and the makeup artists in those salons? They’re in on it, too. They make you look in all those mirrors. But if the studio audience sees you looking too good, they will claim you. The way they did each one of them. They were murdered, Dahlia. And it was covered up by the police.”

“Sunny, none of those deaths are connected in any way.”

“Really?” Sunny said scornfully. “And how is it that you know so much about it? Does anybody really know about those deaths? Aren’t they suspiciously shrouded by mystery? All of them?”

“Sun, you need to find the right medication,” Dahlia said quietly.

“There are no medications for this,” Sunny said, flaring.

“Don’t you understand that you think that because of the illness?” Dahlia asked her.

“No,” she insisted. “Because if you look at the evidence, you will see that beautiful women die all the time at the hands of the studio audience.”

A breeze from behind Dahlia made the pictures on the wall flutter, and she looked at her cousin standing among them, and the scene was more than a nightmare. Eventually these terrible delusions would have to do Sunny in. Now she was just pasting pictures on
the wall, but what if the studio audience, those people on the other side of the mirrors, told her to do away with herself?

“Please, won’t you try taking the medication that Dr. Diamond gave you?”

“No. I won’t be a zombie ever again.”

“Maybe this pill will be different. Don’t you remember what he said about trying all the keys to the door?”

“I remember. But he’s not the one who has to walk around feeling the way I do when I take them. I won’t be helpless. No.”

“Sunny, if a psychopharmacologist who prescribes pills to people like you every day says there’s even a remote chance that you might get to the point where you can make your music and not see the studio audience, won’t it be worth the struggle? Please go and find the bag that Joe Diamond gave you with the pills in it.”

“It can’t work,” Sunny said.

“We have to try,” Dahlia insisted.

“No.”

Dahlia sighed. “I’m out of energy, I’m out of ideas, I’m out of money, and I don’t know what to do next. I’m going to go sit out there and work on the songs I wrote and see if I can get them into some shape for Harry Brenner to hear. I probably should try to get a room back for you, if not at the Sea View, then at someplace like it. And understand, I don’t say that as a threat but because it’s the only real way for you to go on.”

Sunny was wearing an old pink bathrobe of
Dahlia’s, and her face was almost as pink as the terry cloth. Dahlia turned to go back to her own room. She hated herself for a million reasons. For stealing the song, for fucking a stranger, for losing Seth, for ever thinking that Helene would leave her money and then being pissed when she didn’t. She wanted to get back into bed and pull the covers up and stay there until she died. She was just at the door of her room when she heard Sunny call out, “Please. Don’t desert me,” so she turned back.

Sunny stood stiffly as she said the next, as if she were summoning up all her courage to say it. “Don’t you think I want to be okay? Don’t you think I’d take even the tiniest glimmer of hope just to be able to get through one day feeling the way you do every day? Even with your boyfriend problems and money problems and career problems, you have a choice every day to be able to function without seeing monsters everywhere you look. I would give up all my musical ability to trade problems with you for one hour.

“No, I take that back, not trade with you, because I wouldn’t wish this on you or anyone. Dahlia, for some reason you decided to bring me this far. To let me be in your house, where you could feed me and take care of me, so I want you to see you made the right choice. I’m not sure if this will do a damn thing, and I suspect it won’t, but…” Sunny pulled her hand from behind her back, and in it was what Dahlia recognized as the bag Joe Diamond had given her containing the pills. Then Sunny reached into the bag, pulled out a card of pills, and pushed one out of the sample bubble pack.

“I’ll give it a few weeks,” she said. “And not be
cause I’m afraid you’ll take me back to the Sea View. I’m not afraid of that compared to some of the places I’ve been and things I’ve seen. I’m doing it because I desperately want anything resembling the old me back again, the person I know I am when my brain isn’t fried.”

The two cousins walked into the kitchen, where Dahlia poured a glass of apple juice for Sunny to help her swallow her first new pill.

“Ooookay,” Sunny said, holding the pill up to her mouth. “Here goes nothin’.”

D
ahlia agonized for hours over her monthly stack of bills. She had so little money left that every time she sat at her desk, she had to decide which ones she could pay part of and which ones she could postpone paying for another month. The money she earned as a masseuse covered her expenses some months and other months amounted to too little. And she hadn’t heard a word from Harry Brenner. Another Hollywood con job, she thought. Faith loves your song. It had to have all been another Hollywood lie. But then how could she expect Harry to be honest with her when she hadn’t been honest with him?

She had no skills, so it wouldn’t be long before she’d have to try to get a job waiting tables, if anybody would even hire someone like her, who didn’t have a minute’s experience doing anything. At four o’clock in the morning, always the time in the dark night
when she’d find herself wide awake obsessing about something, she’d lie in bed picturing herself in a piano bar playing requests to earn the few dollars that the drunken patrons shoved into a brandy snifter.

Every time the phone rang, she hoped it would be a new massage client. Today when it rang, she’d been looking at the coupon for her mortgage payment, thinking she would definitely have to sell something to get the money to pay it, but the only thing she owned that was worth selling was the piano, and she couldn’t part with that.

“H’lo.”

“Miss Gordon? This is Louise. I work for Leroy Berk. Leroy asked that I call to tell you he’s been traded to a team in Boston, so he’s moving, and he won’t need your services anymore. He said to send you his best.”

“I understand,” Dahlia said, sighing. “Tell him I wish him the best, too.” They were dropping like flies. She had some clients left, but she was afraid those few were iffy. Risa Braverman was talking about moving to New York to be closer to her children, and Margie Kane and her yoga-teacher lover had been cooing over the idea of buying property in Santa Cruz and opening a yoga school there. Unless Harry Brenner came through with a miracle, Dahlia would have to figure out a way to scare up some new clients.

She took a handful of her business cards out of her desk drawer and tried to think of places she could post them where some potential client might see them and respond. She couldn’t even afford to take out an ad in any of the throwaway papers. When Seth was
around, he always kicked in more than his share during her lean times. Now there was no Seth to rescue her. And keeping Sunny around was costing a fortune in food, not to mention how much energy it took to care for her.

Sunny’s room was still a mess, and the movie-star, model, and princess photos seemed to be increasing in number. Now they were taped to the windows and the lampshades, too, haphazardly stuck on every available surface. After the last three weeks of standing over Sunny each day, presenting her with a glass of juice and watching her take her pill, Dahlia was sure the new medication was never going to work.

She bought a little timer with a beeping alarm to remind herself to remind Sunny to take the pill. Then she took the calendar she’d gotten as a gift from the Owl Dry Cleaners at the beginning of the year and made an
x
on it every day as soon as she saw Sunny swallow the pill. Once a day she made Sunny get out of the house with her to take a long walk around Sherman Oaks Park, and Sunny seemed to be feeling stronger physically.

In a journal next to Dahlia’s bed, which she kept there in case she had any late-night ideas for lyrics, she made sure to include a sentence or two before she fell asleep about Sunny’s mood. When she called Joe Diamond to tell him Sunny had finally agreed to take the pills, he seemed pleased but cautious.

“You have to be patient,” he told Dahlia. “We need to determine if the dose is appropriate, and we really won’t be able to assess the efficacy for certain until she’s been on it for three months.”

Dahlia grunted into the phone and said something about how she was sure that at the end of three months,
she
would be the mad one. The doctor called in a refill prescription, and Dahlia picked up the new supply of pills and kept them in her own bathroom, continuing the rituals. But she wasn’t hopeful. Most days Sunny seemed to be getting worse instead of better. Dahlia could hear her pacing the house every night and, after a while, pounding out songs on the piano.

Dahlia wondered how long she could continue to postpone listing the house? One morning she looked through the want ads, then called a telephone number that was in an ad placed by a talent agency looking for a receptionist. “Got computer skills?” the woman on the phone asked her, and Dahlia hung up.

By the end of the fourth week of Sunny’s taking the new medication, she was sleeping through the night and making her bed in the morning. One day she took down all the movie-star, model, and princess photos. That same day at breakfast, she asked Dahlia if they could go to the movies in Westwood to see an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie she’d seen advertised on TV, and Dahlia agreed. Sunny loved going to the movies. She seemed to get as much pleasure from being among the people who were milling around in front of the theater and waiting in line to go in as she did from the movie itself.

At the multiplex in Westwood, Dahlia waited in line to buy a huge box of popcorn for them to share, and as she sank back into the soft seat in the air-conditioned theater, she was hoping to get caught up in the action
of the film, but she couldn’t stop her mind from racing with worry about money. Probably Harry Brenner’s not calling her was the best thing that could happen regarding “What’s Happened to Me?” If Faith Hill had changed her mind and didn’t use the song, at least Dahlia wouldn’t need to worry about having Sunny find out that she’d sold it as her own. Right, she said to herself, all I’d need to worry about instead is the small stuff, like how we’re going to afford to eat.

Sunny loved the movie. She cheered and stomped and applauded at all the action scenes. Afterward, on the way to the parking lot, she took in Westwood Village hungrily with her eyes, looking with amusement at the crowds of people, clucking her tongue at the odd outfits or the spiked hairdos. “I feel as if I’ve just landed from some other galaxy,” she said. “I mean, when I was at the Sea View, I went to the mall all the time, but I guess I never really noticed how strange some of the people were. Unless maybe they’re stranger here than in San Diego.”

Her mind is clearing, Dahlia thought. The great fog must be lifting, and that’s why she’s noticing details about people now. On the way home, Sunny babbled endlessly about which scenes she loved in the movie as Dahlia steered the wobbly van around Mulholland Drive. The curvy road that divided the city from the Valley was Dahlia’s favorite route home. On clear days she liked to look out on each side at the bird’s-eye views of the panoramas of L.A. and the San Fernando Valley.

Today it was bright and warm, and the windows of the van were open. The radio was on, and Sunny was
pushing the buttons as impatiently as a child, listening to a song on one station for a few seconds, then turning to another and another until Dahlia wanted to scream for her to stop. And when she finally did stop to listen for a moment, she heard a haunting song.

“I keep getting in my own way, unable to change. Everybody sees it, and they say I’m acting strange.” Holy shit, Dahlia thought. I wrote those words. It was all she could do not to pull over to the side of the road just to stop and drink it in. Her lyrics. Their song. She wanted to shriek with joy. It was Faith Hill’s marvelous voice belting out Sunny’s tune combined with Dahlia’s lyrics, and there was a drop-dead arrangement behind her. But Dahlia was elated for only one instant, and then she was clutched with anxiety.

Every day for weeks, she had promised herself she would take care of this situation. She’d meant to break the news to Sunny before something like this could happen, but she’d postponed it again and again. Now her heart pounded, both from the exquisite excitement of hearing her lyrics sung by a big star and because she knew that the time had come when Sunny would discover her crime, and she didn’t know what she was going to say about it.

Her first instinct was to reach over and change the station in the hope that Sunny wouldn’t realize what was happening. But she thought again and let it play, deciding that maybe it was good for Sunny to hear it this way. She was counting on the idea that the thrill of hearing that wonderful singer selling her song could be so exciting for Sunny that she’d forget her ridiculous rules about keeping the songs to herself.
That’s it, Dahlia thought, reaching to turn it up louder, but as she did, Sunny grabbed her wrist hard and stopped her.

“My God!” Sunny said. “My God! That’s my song! Isn’t that my song? Do you hear it, too? That’s not something
like
my song—that’s my very song. With my hook. And somebody must have written lyrics to it. My God, who stole my song?”

The song sounded so good and so powerful. Dahlia felt ashamed and afraid and elated at the same time, and she had no idea what to say. Cars behind her were honking and then peeling around and past the van. There was a buzzing in her ears, and her cheeks were hot. She was caught. She had to confess. This should be a thrilling moment for her. The fact that the song was on the air meant that now the checks would pour in. Big checks. But she wasn’t happy. She was sick and guilty and horrified at her own greed.

“How did this happen?” Sunny wondered, her hands clutching her hair and pulling at it frantically. “Dahlia,” she said, turning to her cousin with panic in her eyes. “Am I creating this? Is this a delusion? Do you hear this, too?” Sunny saw Dahlia hesitate, and she took her hesitation to mean she didn’t understand the problem. “I can hear Faith Hill singing lyrics to my song,” she wailed, her face contorted in pain. Now she reached over and turned up the volume. “Oh, God! I hear that, and I know it can’t really be there. And I thought the pills were working so well. But this is just another hallucination.”

Now the music swelled, and Faith was singing the bridge. What an awesome moment this should be for
both of us, Dahlia thought. Now, at last, she had to tell the truth.

“Sunny, it isn’t a hallucination,” Dahlia said, hoping Sunny would be able to handle the news. “It
is
Faith Hill singing your song. Those are my lyrics, and I sold it to her. I mean, I lied to my friend the arranger and told him that I wrote both the lyrics and the music, and he took it to her, and she wanted to sing it because it’s so good. So I said it was okay.”

Maybe it
will
be okay, Dahlia prayed for an instant. Maybe she’ll be glad now that she realizes she isn’t hallucinating. Maybe now that she knows she wrote a song a big star wanted to record, she’ll be happy. But what had been fear in Sunny’s eyes only a moment earlier was now blind rage.

“You what?” With a lunge toward Dahlia, she grabbed the wheel of the van and jerked at it, forcing the rickety vehicle to swerve and careen crazily off the road, toward the edge of the cliff.

“No!” Dahlia cried out in terror, slamming on the brakes just in time to stop the van from plummeting into the valley, but now its front wheels jutted out perilously over the cliff. Dahlia elbowed Sunny hard, trying to regain control of the wheel, afraid the van was going to roll forward if she let go, but the much bigger Sunny held on tightly enough to make her knuckles white, all the while glaring furiously at Dahlia.

“You stole my song? You took credit for my music? You let somebody record it when you knew I didn’t want that?” Sunny screamed while Dahlia, nauseated with terror that the van was going to go over the cliff with the two of them in it, cringed and whimpered
apologies, to Sunny and to God. “You sold it without asking me?” Sunny’s face was purple with rage. I’m going to die, Dahlia thought.

“I could kill us right now,” Sunny said, as if she were reading Dahlia’s thoughts. “I
should
kill
you.
You know I could do it and get off scot-free, because I’m a proven crazy person. What’s the worst they could do to me? Put me in an insane asylum? They’d have a hard time finding one I don’t know intimately. And so what? I’d be back in the lockup? At least there they tell me the truth! At least there they don’t steal from me! How could you do this to me? I rocked your crib at night, and you would steal from me?”

“I did it to help you,” Dahlia said, choking on her own lie. It was a desperate lie.

Faith was belting out the last few bars, and the song sounded spectacular. The powerful emotional finish was rising all around them. “I’m sorry.” Dahlia’s voice was thick with fear and guilt. “It started because I loved your melody so much, and then that lyric came to me, and I was singing it to myself while Harry was on the phone, and he overheard me.” Sunny took her arm off the wheel, enabling Dahlia to throw the van into reverse. Miraculously, the back tires took hold and moved, and the van lurched back onto the dirt shoulder. Sunny pushed the door open, got out, and walked to the edge of the cliff, where she sat down with her face in her hands, but Dahlia could still hear what she was saying.

“All I have left is my music, and you took it without asking me. How could you do it?” She was right. She had one thing, her gift, and Dahlia had violated her by
lifting it wholesale, and now Sunny was lucid enough to understand what had happened. Seth was the one who’d told Dahlia about Sunny’s mind-set right from the beginning. “She doesn’t want the same things you want. She wants to compose her songs and play them, but selling them to the world isn’t part of the deal.” Dahlia looked over at Sunny, then climbed out of the van and walked over to sit next to her.

Sunny didn’t say anything for a long time. Fast cars whizzed by on the road behind them. Finally she spoke, staring straight ahead. “Did you know there used to be rumors that Irving Berlin didn’t write his own melodies?” Sunny said, staring straight ahead. “That they were written by someone who people in those days called ‘a little colored boy’? There were people who thought that the songs Irving Berlin wrote were too hot for some nice, staid, white Jewish boy to write. Maybe that same little colored boy, a long time later, worked for Leiber and Stoller, too. Because everyone wondered how two East Coast Jewish boys could write songs that were so filled with soul and sounded so black.”