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Authors: Cathy Lamb

BOOK: A Different Kind of Normal
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He laughed, then hollered, “Whooeee! Tate Bruxelle, you are gonna bring a championship into my life! Yes sirree! We’re goin’ to state, I can feel it
in my bones.
”
11
“I
found her.” I heard the catch in my mother’s voice over the phone. “I found Brooke.”
I slammed the lid on my Crock-Pot. I was making cowboy soup with garlic, marjoram, oregano, beef, and several different types of beans and onions. I had only shed two tears into the pot for Ethan, then bucked up and moved on with the recipe.
“Where is she?”
“She says she’s at a women’s shelter in Los Angeles. I’m going to pick her up.”
“She’s letting you come get her?” Brooke often refused to see us. My mother would hire a detective, as she had this time, to make sure her daughter wasn’t dead, in a hospital, or in jail. He’d find her, my mother would contact her, and Brooke would say, “No, I can’t see you. I’m sorry. I’m a mess. I don’t want you to see me right now. Mom, you’ll cry. When I’m better, when I’m better.”
Her refusal would break my mother down. She’d have to go to bed for two days and pull the covers over her head, then she’d get back up and go to work.
“At least she’s alive, Jaden, we know she’s alive, there’s still hope. Damn that girl. It would have been easier to raise a loose python.”
“How does she sound?” I instinctively braced myself. That’s how it is dealing with people on drugs. You are always bracing yourself. Always in some state of grief, unresolved anger, absolute emotional chaos, or determined detachment.
“She says”—my mother paused, and I knew she was yanking herself together—“that her ex-boyfriend beat her up recently, but that she’s been sober.”
“Heard that before.”
“I know, sugar, I know.”
My mother sounded exhausted, but utterly relieved. It is obliterating and wrenching and a slip of hell dealing with addicts.
“I have never given up hope on Brooke,” my mother said. “She’s made me down whiskey by the gallon, and now and then I’ve snuck a cigarette, and I have cried so much there should be no drought here in California, but I have always hoped.”
I hoped there was hope.
 
A couple of days later I told Tate I was going to fly down and spent the night with my mom. Tate was spending the night at Anthony and Milt’s with the basketball team so I didn’t have to worry about him. He was so excited to go. Being part of the team had meant a lot more social activities for Tate, which I tried not to feel guilty about, but did anyhow.
“Tell Nana Bird that I saw her in that love scene in the hotel. She needs to know that I know what she’s doing when my back is turned.” He shook his finger. “Tell her I’m watching her cheat with Alistair, that it will bring her nothing but pain, mark my words!”
He loves to say “mark my words,” because my mother says it. “I’ll tell her.”
“Tell her, too, that protection is important.” Both pointer fingers were now pointing up while he intoned, his voice deep, “Condoms should always be used. No one is safe anymore. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”
I groaned. “Your Nana Bird does not need a condom. She’s acting, Tate, there are cameramen, directors, other actors, all on set watching and eating doughnuts.”
He opened his eyes wide, mocking innocence. “I know about these private things because of the piles of women pounding at the door at night seeking my purity, Mom, wanting to take that special part of Tate Bruxelle! They can’t get a lid on their passion, I’m just sayin’.”
I shook my head. “It’s been hard to keep the women from your body, Tate.”
“No kidding! I’m a chick magnet. Also, tell her that she needs to cover up. It’s weird for me to see my Nana Bird in black lingerie.” He shuddered. “Yeah. Tell her to put a robe on or, better yet, a parka. Yeah. A parka.”
With dawn breaking over the horizon, I drove to the airport through the column of our bare maple trees, their branches a stick maze in the sky, waiting for winter to be over.
 
My mother lives in a hacienda-style house that sprawls on top of a hill in the Hollywood Hills.
There’s the expected high wall, a gate, security, etc. But once past that, her property is filled with palm trees, jacarandas, magnolias, lemon and orange trees, and a swath of manicured lawn. It’s a slice of hacienda tranquility.
Her home has a breezeway that guides visitors to the front door, past a huge fountain in the shape of Aphrodite, goddess of love, in the center of a circular patio. The house has white stucco walls, and the air flows through it as if there are no walls at all. Wood shutters close things up, a red tile roof keeps things cool, and my mother’s Mexican pottery, ceramics, colorful art, embroidered pillows, and plush, red, blue, and yellow furniture set the whole place off. She also has a few voodoo dolls, which she says honor our “witchly past, the witches in our line were related to royalty, you know.”
There are three bedrooms upstairs. Brooke and I had always shared a corner room with doors that opened to an upstairs porch. We all had views of the patio, pool, and the city beyond that.
The family room opens to a kitchen filled with bright, hand-painted colored tiles bought from Mexico on the counters, island, and backsplash. Off to the side is my father’s den, where he used to write his scripts. It hasn’t changed a bit since he died. My mother simply shut the door on that room, and that was that. She couldn’t bear to do anything else. She goes in there now and then to talk to him.
“I give your father an update on our lives in there. I open the doors and watch the butterflies, like we used to do. I eat oranges; we used to eat oranges together. I watch the sunset, we loved sunsets, and I have strawberry daiquiris while I watch it, because that’s what we used to do together. I feel closer to him there. When I leave, I feel the loss, but it’s dimmed somewhat over the years and I know he loves to hear how things are going. He always wanted to know everything about you kids. He loved you crazy-mazie.”
I think of her sitting in that den, alone, talking to my dad, and it hurts. The whole thing still hurts.
Anyhow, out back, a pool with a cascading waterfall and a hot tub with its own waterfall shine in the sun. She has her own vegetable and herb gardens that she lovingly tends and has also planted her “hereditary witch flowers,” as she calls them, Canterbury bells, hollyhocks, lilies, irises, sweet peas, cosmos, red poppies, peonies, and rows of roses.
My mother does work a lot, but she has free time. “I miss you and Caden, but I want to be here in case Brooke ever pulls her red head out of her buttocks and accepts help. I have to see things grow, I have to make pretty out of this hot and dried-out land, I have to be completely absorbed in my garden, or I will go straight out of my head with worry about that kid, plant myself in a jacaranda tree like a nesting peacock, and refuse to come down and face life.”
Her garden, with its pathways, separate rooms, trellises, and patios, has been featured in numerous magazines. She has two trellises full of honeysuckle, and the reason behind it makes me sad.
Her home is a piece of utter peace.
Peace in the Hollywood Hills.
It was endlessly sad that Brooke wrecked that peace. She was glass smashing through glass.
I hadn’t seen Brooke in years.
I didn’t expect it to be peaceful.
 
Brooke cried when she opened my mother’s front door and saw me, the fountain trickling behind us, the trellis overhead dripping with pink bougainvillea.
I tried to harden my heart to her, there on my mother’s doorstep, to toughen up, so I wouldn’t be hurt again, sucked back into her miserable life, her troubles, her drug addiction, her lies, because I knew I would collapse under the weight of it if I did.
I tried to see her dispassionately, or at least with the anger I felt toward her for breaking up our family, for leaving Tate, for not being a sister to me.
I tried to summon up some of that righteous, roaring anger and piercing resentment as the wind whistled through the jacaranda trees.
I could not.
Her face was swollen on one side, one green eye almost shut. She’d had stitches. Her body was thin, her hair was thin, her clothes were thin. Her life was thin, paper thin, as if it hung by a feather of a dying bird. It was she who had lost out. She had lost out on Tate, our family, a family of her own. All those years of her life, ruined.
I threw out my arms and she hugged me close, her body shaking, her tears a steady stream pouring from her eyes.
“I have missed you so much, Brooke.”
She said, “I missed you, too,” but I could hardly understand it through her sobs.
 
Brooke appeared to be completely sober, but she looked half-dead, a tired skeleton with skin and dried, dead-looking auburn hair.
“It has not been a pleasant time,” Brooke said, a wry understatement. “It’s a shipwreck time of life.”
I put my teacup down on my mother’s kitchen table. The table had been a gift from one of her co-stars, Blake Montorio. She had chosen him out of three other hopefuls to be on
Foster’s Village
. He’d made his mark on the show before the manipulative Elsie had him locked away in an insane asylum for five years. In real life he’d gone on to a successful career in movies. He’d been grateful ever since.
Brooke traced one of the carvings in the table with her finger. The table, long enough for ten, had been made by a Santa Fe artist especially for my mother. We called it The Table of Witches. It was a blend of oranges, yellows, reds, blues, and greens.
My mother had told Blake of our witchly past, and the artist had painted pictures of women with auburn-colored hair in bold dresses with stars and hearts high up in the branches of trees, a half moon shining in one corner, a group of white stars in another. The trees looked alive, their branches twisting and turning, entwined with one another, the witches dancing across the bridges and arcs. It was magnificent.
“It’s a shipwreck time of life
and
Brooke’s having a bad hair day,” my mother drawled. “Look at her locks.”
I shook my head at my mother. “We’re getting into that now? She’s had a shipwreck time. I’m not worried about her tangles.” I was horrified, sickened by Brooke’s appearance, though I’d seen her in this state before. You don’t get “used to” seeing your sister beat up. I reached for Brooke’s hand, chilly cold to the touch, and squeezed it.
“Um . . .” Brooke said, her voice hoarse as she pushed a trembling hand through her lank hair. “I left my . . . uh . . . my ex-boyfriend before rehab and he disagreed with my leaving, so when I was released from rehab, and he was later paroled out of jail, he came and found me and rearranged part of my face. I then went to the women’s shelter.”
“I took her to the doctor.” My mother’s face was ashen, but she was trying hard to regain her sassiness. “We went to see a handsome doctor and all Brooke wanted to do was talk about the bruises on her face, the cracked ribs, the stitches she needed in two places, and the red line she had growing up the side of her leg toward her heart that could have killed her.”
“Brooke—” I felt faint. I gripped my teacup. We were all having orange herbal tea and spinach mushroom omelets, but no one was eating.
“Brooke’s conversation wasn’t engaging, it wasn’t . . .
inviting,
if you know what I mean,” my mother reprimanded, her coiffed bob swinging. “It was a poor choice of topic. The doctor was very handsome. No wedding ring. I asked him if he was married, he said no, and I said to him, ‘I know of a girl for you.’ ”
I leaned toward my mother, aghast. “You didn’t!”
“She did,” Brooke said. “Mom, what else did you want me to talk about with him?”
My mother sighed, impatiently, but I knew it was an act. She was flattened by the semi-deathly state of her daughter and was using wry humor and false bravado to handle her own emotions. It was the way she’d gotten through this mess and through the varied tragedies in her life. My mother plucked at her white silk shirt and white pencil skirt, designer wear, for sure, her feet clad in Manolo Blahnik. “You could have asked him out.”
My jaw dropped, and my eyes connected with Brooke’s one unbeaten eye. Brooke was all squished down, a broken bird whose wings had been ripped out.
“You have to be kidding, Mom. You wanted me to get a
date?
I’m a former drug addict. We don’t usually”—she put her fingers up for quotes—“date.”
“A proper date.” She waved a finger at Brooke. “One who will treat you nice, take you to the symphony or tea on Sunday afternoons or to Maui for a luau, and not bash your face up and ruin your ribs and cut you with a knife.”
Ugh.
“Mom, I was in the doctor’s office, on a hard, padded, brown table wearing a blue sheath thing that opened up for the world to see my butt and my bruises, and I was supposed to turn on the charm? Flirt? Be suggestive, seductive? Gee. I could have batted my eyelashes out of my one good eye.”
Ah. There was Brooke, the funny one. She winked at me with the one unbeaten eye, it was a weak wink, but it was there.
“You should not have shown him your ass, you are right there, daughter. There’s nothing to it anymore, no curves, and men like curves. Take a gander at your sister. See her boobs and butt. She flows. Men want that flow. You need to put on weight and get some flow. I have an amazing cook and she’ll have you all fattened up in no time, then you can go back and ask him out.”

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