The Corner of Bitter and Sweet (36 page)

He turned to me. “Okay—get in.”

“What?”

“Get in the tub.” He held out his hand. “And hand over the camera.”

I shook my head. “No way.”

“I told you I wasn’t going to let you get away with the no-pictures thing,” he said reaching for it while I tried to hold it behind my back. Soon he gave up and started kissing me instead. That, I did not fight him on.

After a while, he pulled back. “Please?”

Just like that first day in the café, I couldn’t help but smile back when I saw his gap-toothed grin.

“Fine,” I sighed, handing it over and climbing in.

He took some shots and then stopped and moved the camera to the side. “Maybe you want to try . . . I don’t know . . . pretending you’re not standing in front of a firing squad?”

I laughed. “Okay, okay.”

I wasn’t sure if one of the hallmarks of being in love was that no matter how corny the person’s jokes were, you found yourself laughing, but that’s how it was for me. Soon enough I was relaxed, not caring how close he got with the camera, even though I was well aware I had a giant zit on my chin.

“Hey, Annabelle?” he asked as he focused.

“Yeah?”

He moved the camera aside. “I love you,” he said, before refocusing.

I smiled. “I love you, too.”

At that, the shutter clicked.

Without even seeing it, I knew it was the best picture of me ever taken.

If my life were a movie or a book, then I would’ve spent my last night with Matt. Maybe, if it were a particularly romantic movie or book, I would’ve even slept with him, so that when I got back to L.A., I could do the “This is the first time I’m flying/driving down the 10 freeway/eating an In-N-Out Double Double with Cheese as a non-virgin.”

But I didn’t.

Instead, I spent my last evening with my mother. Eating Lean Cuisines in her bed watching
Terms of Endearment
. Over the last few weeks, she had caved and gotten hooked on Stewart’s iced coffees, so we drank those as well.

Although we had done this a million times before, this time was different. It was different because
we
were different—both individually and together. We were just as connected as before, but that umbilical cord—the one that, on good days, felt like an anchor and, on bad days, felt like it was strangling me—was gone. What held us together now was a faith that no matter what happened, we—individually and together—would be okay.

After the movie was over, and we had finished drying our eyes, and she told me for the nine millionth time about how, the night she went to sleep after deciding to cancel the abortion appointment, she then dreamed about a little girl with brown curls, I stood up.

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

I went to my room and got my laptop and then crawled back into bed with her. Opening the Negative Space file, I showed her the photos that I had shown Billy on the train. The ones that showed my mother at her ugliest and most beautiful. Her worst and her best. Who she had been and who she was becoming.

The ones that told a story that no journalist or gossip blogger could write.

Her story. My story. Our story.

The story I would not have traded for anything in the world.

EPILOGUE

There’s a photo I keep on the night table next to my bed in my dorm room in Boston, where I’m in my first year at college.

It’s a photo of my mother and me taken on Zuma Beach in Malibu one afternoon last February that Billy took. She’s wearing a vintage one-shouldered cherry-red Halston dress. Straight and simple, hugging every one of the curves on her forty-four-year-old-body that she has finally come to love (or at least
like
) rather than attempt to diet away. Her honey-colored hair is being whipped by the wind as she leans her head back and laughs.

In the photo, I am not in front of her or behind her, like I am in our other family photos. I am next to her, in a long royal-blue embroidered satin dress with a slit up the leg that I bought for thirty-five dollars in Chinatown one Sunday after dim sum with my friends. New friends I’d met that fall. Friends who don’t care that my mother is famous, or a recovering alcoholic, or living with the guy who was just voted
People
’s Sexiest Man Alive for the third year in a row. In the photo, my brown curls are piled on my head, just about to break free of all the bobby pins and spill down my back, which I will then not pin back up and my mother will not say a word about.

In the photo, I, too, am laughing. But not the kind of laughter that comes out of making the best of a horrible situation, or because it’s either laugh or burst into tears and not be able to stop. It’s the kind of laughter that comes from the deepest place in your belly, the kind that’s about nothing and everything. The kind you wish you could bottle and take out and sniff when you’re having a bad day.

The kind of laughter that happens only when you’re with your best friend.

If you were to put a magnifying glass up to the photo, you would be able to see how tightly my mother and I are clutching each other’s hands—so hard that you can see the veins in our wrists pop out. Her hand, with its short buffed clear nails, and mine with red polished ones.

But in this photo—taken hours before my mother won the award for Best Actress at the Academy Awards—we are holding on to each other not out of fear, not because we’re circling the drain and if we let go, that’s the end of the story. We’re holding on because we choose to.

And because this is just the beginning.

There is another photo on my night table as well.

It was taken at a photo gallery in Venice a few months ago, at the opening of the exhibit of the photos I had taken of Mom. The exhibit was called
If You’re Going Through Hell, Keep Going
, something that Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Great Britain, had said, and had been suggested to me by Matt during one of our nightly FaceTime sessions after I got back to L.A.

Every review included a line that I’d probably gotten the show because I was the Daughter Of Janie Jackson, but that’s not the truth. The truth is that one afternoon, I was sitting at Om My Gawd trying to focus on an English paper but instead thinking about a conversation I had had with Billy the evening before as we cooked dinner in the house he and Mom had bought together in Laurel Canyon. A conversation, much like the one we had on the train back from Manhattan, where he had told me that it was time to share my work with the world because maybe it could help someone else.

That afternoon I packed up my laptop and walked next door to the Pink Gallery. The owner, Nicole, happened to be there, and happened to have time to look at the photos on my laptop. She offered me a solo show before she’d even gotten to the ones where Mom’s face was visible—before she knew I was a Daughter Of anyone of importance. Billy did, however, help me edit them.

This photo is of me and the people I consider my family.

Matt is on my left. In one hand he holds the bouquet of tulips and lilies he brought me because I had once mentioned in passing, during one of the first times we hung out, almost two years ago, that they were my favorite flowers. And with his other hand, he holds mine. To my right is Ben, with his arm around my shoulder, looking like a proud father. Something he was to me for so many years, and something he would soon be to the little boy whom Alice—standing next to him, with her very pregnant belly—would soon give birth to.

Because he’s shorter, in front of me is Walter, with whom I still FaceTime or talk almost every day so we can share the craziness in our heads between meetings. As he likes to say, thankfully we’re not both sick on the same day so we can help each other out.

Behind me is Billy—who, as much as I tell him not to, still calls me
dude
, and still eats the last of anything I bake—with his hands on the tops of my shoulders, the glint of the platinum of his wedding band visible.

And next to him, with her head peeking over my other shoulder, not trying to take center stage but completely willing to stand in the background, is my mother.

Glowing.

And looking so proud I’m afraid she might burst.

PROM.

The best dress. The best shoes. The best date. Cindy Ella Gold is sick of it all.

Her anti-prom letter in the school newspaper does more to turn Cindy into Queen of the Freaks than to close the gap between the popular kids and the rest of the students. Everyone thinks she’s committed social suicide, except for her two best friends—the yoga goddess India and John Hughes–worshipping Malcolm—and shockingly, the most popular senior at Castle Heights High and Cindy’s crush, Adam Silver. But with a little bit of help from an unexpected source—and the perfect pair of shoes—Cindy realizes that she still has a chance at a happily-ever-after.

“A big heart + an insanely keen sense of humor = exactly the sort of book I love to read!”

—Lauren Myracle,
New York Times
bestselling author of
TTYL
and
Thirteen

PRINCESS, MEET FROG . . .

Dylan Shoenfield is the princess of L.A.’s posh Castle Heights High. She has the coolest boyfriend, the most popular friends, and a brand-new “it” bag that everyone covets. But when she accidentally tosses her bag into a fountain, this princess comes face-to-face with her own personal frog: self-professed film geek Josh Rosen. In return for rescuing Dylan’s bag, Josh convinces Dylan to let him film her for his documentary on high school popularity. Reluctantly, Dylan lets F-list Josh into her A-list world. But when Dylan’s so-called Prince Charming of a boyfriend dumps her flat, her life—and her social status—come to a crashing halt. Can Dylan—with Josh’s help—pull the pieces together to create her own happily-ever-after?

“The perils of popularity are showcased in a lighthearted contemporary novel filled with snappy dialogue.”

—
Publishers Weekly

WHO’S AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD WOLF?

When Sophie Green goes to spend Spring Break at her grandmother’s house in Florida, she never dreams she’ll end up catching the eye of the hottest guy she’s ever seen. As much as Sophie craves excitement, she’s a seat belt–wearing, three-square-meals-a-day, good girl at heart. . . . She doesn’t even have the guts to wear Dark As Midnight nail polish. But Sophie dreams of being the girl who isn’t afraid to live on the edge. So when a motorcycle-riding hottie calls her “Red” and flashes her a wolfish grin that practically screams Danger, what else is a nice girl to do but jump at the chance to walk on the wild side?

“Robin Palmer takes a classic fairy tale and spins it on its head!
Little Miss Red
is funny and full of heart. You won’t be able to put it down.”

—Jen Calonita, bestselling author of the
Secrets of My Hollywood Life series and
Sleepaway Girls