The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (35 page)

“I know I didn’t,” she said calmly as she stepped into one of the gowns. “Because I knew you wouldn’t come if I did.”

Georgina turned to the assistant. “I’m thinking strapless bra. So the drooping isn’t so noticeable.”

I could see how insulted Mom was, but she had been doing this long enough to know that the three crew members you never wanted to get on the bad side of after the D.P. were wardrobe, makeup, and hair, so she kept her mouth shut.

“You want me to watch you
die
,” I said.

She shrugged, holding her boobs up over the gown in an attempt to de-droop them. “What can I tell you. I thought maybe it would make you appreciate me more,” she replied, tweaking my nose.

I laughed. At least she was honest. Warped, but honest.

“But seriously, there’s something I do want to talk to you about.”

A production assistant rapped on the door. “Ten-minute warning,” she yelled out.

“Go sit,” Mom said. “And we’ll have lunch in my trailer afterward, okay?”

I was in the midst of making small talk with the script supervisor while Alistair and the D.P. fought about how to shoot the scene (according to Mom, having come from the theater, Alistair didn’t think that moving the camera was all that necessary, which had resulted in a few days’ worth of very slow footage) when Billy walked on set, trailed by a P.A. trotting behind him like a puppy.

When I saw Billy, I did the mature thing: I shifted in my seat in hopes that he wouldn’t see me so I wouldn’t have to talk to him.

“Hey, Annabelle,” he said as he came up to me.

“Oh, hey,” I said, as if surprised to see him. The script supervisor—who, like almost all the female members of the crew—had a huge crush on Billy, got up and made some excuse about how she had to go see someone about something.

“I texted you a few times,” he said. “To see if we could talk about this.”

“I know. I just . . . I was just so . . .
mad
.” Dr. Warner would have been proud of me. Mad was not something I did. At least not admitting it out loud. I much preferred to let it build up inside of me so that it resulted in stomach problems.

He nodded. “I get that. And you should be. I was totally out of line. But Annabelle, you need to know this: it had absolutely nothing to do with wanting to get you out of the way—”

“I know it didn’t,” I replied. He didn’t have to ask me if I wanted to go to the movies, or for hikes, but he had. A lot.

Before he could continue, the hair and makeup people descended on him. “Can we talk about this more later?” he pleaded.

I nodded.

I watched him as he walked away. Yet again, Billy Barrett was proving to be a nice guy.

I was not an easy cry. Not in life, and especially not when watching movies. (Mom, on the other hand, was an easy cry—especially now that she was sober and had “gotten her feelings back,” which meant even more balled-up used tissues strewn around the house for me to pick up.) But as I watched Mom die in Billy’s arms over and over on the steps of what was supposed to be Emily Dickinson’s house but was really a Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall, my sniffling turned into full-out ugly cry gulping, to the point where I had to excuse myself and go hide in the bathroom and sob under a mural of what the caption said was “life in paradise, from the
Knowledge
book.” (Apparently, paradise included people of all races, in addition to koala bears and tigers.)

It was as if every single acting class and every session with every coach she’d ever had paid off in that one scene. Instead of being sappy, or not sad enough, the chemistry between Mom and Billy was spot-on. It was funny and sexy and true, and every time she smiled at him right before she closed her eyes for the last time, your heart broke over and over and over as you realized how much it sucked that after only just finding each other, they had to say good-bye. They were so good together that even though Alistair had no vague, passive-aggressive feedback to give, he just kept saying “And again” while subtly wiping at his eyes. (“The English just
hate
showing emotion,” Mom was always saying. “That’s why I had to break up with Ewan, remember him?”)

And I wasn’t just crying out of relief that Mom was so good. She was. So good that, as much as I worried I was jinxing it, I was ready to start looking for something to wear to the Oscars. With every take, I realized that even though she drove me crazy, and had no sense of boundaries, and totally embarrassed me, and was constantly making everything about her, one day—hopefully not for many, many years—I would lose her.

As far back as I could remember, every time Mom tucked me in, after I had run out of excuses to keep her there (another story, a glass of water, checking my group of stuffed animals to make sure none were in danger of suffocating during the night), after she had gotten me to tell her I loved her all the way up to God, past God, past God, she would take my cheeks in between her hands and she’d say “
You
—Annabelle Meryl Jackson (the Meryl was for Meryl Streep, her favorite actress of all time)—are my heart.” She said it so many times that for the longest time I thought it was another term for “I love you.” As I got older—especially when I was mad at her—I’d roll my eyes when she said it, or try to push her away. Not only did I find it corny, but I’d feel a pressure in my own chest. A pressure to make sure that everything worked out and we were okay, because if we weren’t, somehow her heart would stop beating and she would stop loving me.

But now I saw, I
was
her heart. I was hers, and she was mine. Sometimes I was able to make myself believe that if I didn’t love her and need her so much, it would make it that less painful when we fought, or when she got drunk, or when she was depressed. Or if I didn’t let myself love her so much, then maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much when the day came when she did die, the idea of which was so horrible to me that every time it crossed my mind I physically had to shake my head to rid myself of it.

As I sat in the bathroom of the Kingdom Hall, blowing my nose into some scratchy toilet paper, something happened. I just knew at my very core that Mom was Mom, and no matter how many self-help books she read and how many AA meetings she went to and how many hours she spent meditating, the chances of her changing into one of those moms you see on TV—the ones who know how to cook and make hospital corners with the sheets and are always running on time—was never going to happen. And that—after years of not being okay—suddenly . . . was.

My mother was nuts, and her favorite hobby was processing her feelings in front of others. (“You know what I call that?
Mental masturbation
,” Walter liked to say before giving a
Beavis and Butt-head
laugh.) And my first response would probably always be to roll my eyes when she started crying in public, but that was all part of the deal. Because on good days, my mother was the sun. She was warm and bright and enveloped everyone and everything around her with this amazing feeling of potential. And she wasn’t just my sun. From the way I sometimes caught Billy gazing at her when she wasn’t looking, she was his as well.

She was the sun, and when the day came when she did close her eyes for the last time, it would get dark. So dark that I couldn’t think about it. But finally, I didn’t have to think about it right then, or every minute of the day. Because as long as she didn’t pick up a drink or a pill, it probably wouldn’t get dark for a very long time. For now, she was still here. And that day, as she did her thing in front of the camera—which, as she liked to say, was when she was utterly completely 100 percent herself—the sun was shining brighter than it had in a long time. It made me feel warm and safe, like I had the other day when I stretched out and felt it on my body while I was at the waterfall with Matt, and he rolled over and put my face between his rough soft hands and kissed me for a very long time.

Which was why, after I splashed some water on my face, I was going to go to her trailer and give my mother a huge hug, and as I did, as I let my body go limp, as I let her hold me as tight as she wanted to, I was going to tell her that not only did I love her all the way up to God, past God, past God, but that I forgave her. For everything.

And for the first time I was going to truly mean it, with all my heart.

And then I was going to tell her that I was going back to L.A for the CalArts thing. Because like Sting sang in that song, “If you love something, set it free.”

Because it was time for both of us to do that.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

It used to be that after Mom did a big scene, the first thing she’d do when she got back to her trailer or dressing room was dig out the bottle of Stoli she kept stashed away and have a drink. That would then be followed by holding whoever was unlucky enough to come in hostage as she dissected her own performance and worried that it wasn’t good enough, and how she should have done this or that different. When the alcohol kicked in, she’d start to calm down, and soon enough it was no longer her fault that she had screwed up—it was the director’s, or her co-star’s. Then, if she got buzzed enough, she’d stop talking about it and move on to other important topics, such as did the hostage think that it was time for her to get her lips done because, while she had been putting it off because she was afraid of looking like Meg Ryan, they did seem to be getting thinner.

When I saw Mom in her trailer after the death scene, she was curled up on the couch playing Words with Friends with Al from Chattanooga, Tennessee.

“Hi, Bug.” She smiled as I walked in. She looked exhausted, but in a good way. I guess dying over and over will do that to you.

“Hi,” I said as I walked over and snuggled up to her and took her arm and curled up under it.

“So what’d you think?” she asked anxiously.

I pulled her arm tighter around me. “I think you were amazing.”

A huge smile came over her face. “Really?”

I nodded.

I couldn’t tell who was hugging who harder. Maybe it didn’t matter.

“So I wanted to talk to you about something—” she started to say.

“And I have something to tell you, too.”

“So what I wanted to say was . . . Wait, would you like to go first?” she asked.

I shook my head. “No, it’s okay.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “I’m really trying to work on my self-centeredness this week.”

I loved my mother, but it was going to take more than a week to put a dent in that one.

“It’s okay. You go.”

“Okay.” She took a deep breath. “So here’s the thing, Bug. I understand why you’re upset about what Billy did. And I don’t blame you. And just so you know, I told him that,” she said. “But . . . I think you should go.”

What?

She started tickling my arm. “I know how much you love photography,” she went on. “And I’m sorry I haven’t been more supportive of it.” She sighed. “I think it’s that when you’re off doing it, you’re so involved with it, and so good at it, and it’s something that I don’t know anything about and . . . I don’t know . . . I feel . . . left out. It sounds crazy, but when you’re doing it, it has this way of making me realize that you’re growing up. And that soon you’ll be gone.”

I moved closer to her. “No, I won’t.”

“Honey, you
will
! Because that’s what happens in normal families!” she cried. “In normal families, kids get to be kids instead of taking care of their parents, and then they grow up and leave and start their own lives!”

“So we’re not normal!” I shot back. “Who cares? Normal is boring anyway.” What was I doing? This was what
I wanted
. To finally get out from under her and lead my own life.

Didn’t I?

She clutched my arm. “You need to go pursue your dreams, Annabelle. You deserve that.”

“But what if—”

“What if what? What if Billy and I break up? What if I get depressed? What if I drink?”

“Well . . . yeah,” I said quietly.

She shook her head. “I’m not planning on any of that happening. But even if it did,
it’s not your problem
.” She started to cry. “It was
never
your problem, and I am so sorry you had to take that on.”

I was crying, too. “It’s okay.”

“It most certainly is
not
okay.” As she wiped her eyes, mascara got all over her face. “I really want you to go, sweetie. Do you understand me?”

I nodded.

“So you’ll go?”

I nodded again.

She smiled. “Good. Now what was it that you wanted to tell me?”

I knew that what my mother had just done was huge, not just for her but for us. And even though that sins-of-omission thing was a real gray area for me, I decided to let her believe that she was the bigger person in this one.

Because she was.

I shook my head. “I can’t remember,” I replied.

On our last day together, Matt brought me back to Overlook Mountain in Woodstock, where we had gone that first afternoon.

“Whatcha thinking about?” he asked as we hiked up the mountain. The mountain that, only a month ago, I had been huffing and puffing up but was now barely breaking a sweat. This outdoors thing was growing on me.

“Just about how much has changed in a month,” I replied. Matt and me. Mom and Billy. Billy and me. Ben and Alice, who I’d just found out the night before via text had gotten engaged. I hadn’t planned for any of it, and yet now I couldn’t imagine my life before it. I mean, I
could
, but I didn’t like to because it had been depressing.

“Pretty wild, huh?” he asked as he took my hand.

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I had promised myself that I would not be that girl who cried when saying good-bye to her summer love. It was way too Nicholas Sparks.

When we got to the half-built hotel, he ran ahead.

“What are you doing?” I called after him.

“Just checking something,” he called back. “Good. It’s still here.”

As I walked up behind him, I saw that it was the bathtub that I had made him get into so I could take his picture. I smiled. That had turned out to be a great photo. In fact, it was the one I planned to frame and put on my nightstand when I got back home.