Monty had been pissed for weeks because I’d accidentally left the water on when filling the tub in the hallway bathroom beside his bedroom. Water spilled over the top of the old claw foot tub, flowed across the threshold and found a shoebox full of the vintage video game cartridges he’d left on the floor just inside his room. They might have been salvageable if Monty had the patience to consider such a thing. Instead he screamed and ranted and set the box afire in the backyard barbecue pit. If it was Spencer’s fault he would have clobbered him without mercy but even when in a rage Monty would never hit us girls. He glared and brooded, held his nose whenever I walked into the room, ignored me more than usual at school where we were in the same class because he’d been held back in second grade. I shrugged it all off irritably because I understood my brother well enough to know that sooner or later he would move on to a different grievance.
And then came the Faberge egg incident. It was the most valuable object in the crumbling mansion where chandeliers hadn’t operated for decades, fixtures were cracked and ants marched in dogged lines along the ivory-colored stucco walls. The egg was an emerald green, encrusted with exquisite pink roses, a gift bestowed on our screen goddess grandmother by some minor European royalty. It used to sit in its own display case in the center of the second floor library, one of the few remaining treasures that hadn’t yet been sold off.
By that time our father, August, had pretty much given up on most things; his career, personal hygiene, and fighting with his bat shit crazy wife. He was forever retreating to the moldy attic room where he could pet his vinyl record collection and write sprawling incoherent memoirs about his life. He would have one more battle left in him – the Battle of Atlantis Star - but it was years from surfacing. Maybe he was storing up the energy for it.
In the meantime, Lita was free to practice her brand of roughshod parenting, which involved nightmarish casting calls (don’t improvise, why the fuck did you improvise?? NEXT!), chronic body shaming (my god, suck in that baby fat, you look like a pregnant fourth grader!) and scattered episodes where she would howl that we were all disgusting brats before running off to places unknown for a few days or a few weeks at a time.
Anyway, I had a habit of dawdling in the library and staring trance-like at the glittering antique. You can’t appreciate a thing like that unless you get close. Close enough to understand the intricate artistry that was spent on its creation.
I would stand there, chewing on my thumbnail, and imagining that I was really the resident of a dazzling realm with no ants crawling the walls or dirty floors beneath my feet, no confusing legacies to grapple with or cruel mothers to avoid.
In that world I was Loren the Beloved, twirling in pink tulle, eating as much ice cream as I pleased and tiptoeing around a gleaming castle. The egg winked at me from its golden pedestal, beckoning, promising.
I needed to get closer.
If I got close enough to touch its surface then the magic was possible.
Typically I wasn’t a dreamy child and at age nine I was old enough to know magic was a false promise. But I placed my hands around the glass dome of the display case, surprised when it lifted easily, and watched my finger move to the nearest embellished rose with the same hypnotic power that a certain fairy tale princess would understand when she touched a sharp spindle.
I didn’t mean any harm. I would have gladly tossed my greatest treasures into the old fire pit behind Monty’s video games before I would have willingly damaged that egg. My mind took a moment to catch up to the horror of the prize object rolling from its perch, sliding across the narrow table and hitting the floor, shattering in several places. I stared in disbelieving shock as broken slivers of pink roses spun out in several directions.
“You are in such deep shit,” said a voice and I whirled around to see Monty standing there with a knowing smirk on his face. His laughter followed me as I sprinted back to my room, where there was nothing to do but crawl beneath the bed and cry until nightfall.
One of the other kids happened to walk past the library and raised the alarm about the shattered egg. It would have been a big deal under the best of circumstances but my mother was feeling especially wronged because Ava had been cut from the casting of a prime time family drama.
And so misfortune became catastrophe. Lita might have blamed the staff if there was any staff remaining to blame. I cowered at the shrill, familiar sound of her voice. She was accusing Ava. Ava was crying. Balling my fists and gritting my teeth, I crawled out from beneath the bed. Let her slap me or withhold dinner for a week, let her perversely grin at the other kids and say in her false sugar voice, “Let’s play a game. Let’s pretend Loren is invisible!”
I’d suffered through all of that before. I could take it again.
My feet were cold on the bare floor and I wished I’d put on shoes. Somehow that made it worse, facing my mother in bare feet. She was shrieking my name from the library.
People would always say Lita Savage was an attractive woman. If I’d I’d been able to separate her character from her face I might have thought so too. Her blonde hair wasn’t natural and her features were a smudge too pointed but she turned heads even in a city stuffed with hopeful, plastic beauty. There was nothing beautiful about her face as she turned on me. My siblings were clotted together in the corner of the library, August was blasting an Elvis record from his attic hideaway and I was on the verge of being eviscerated by Lita Savage’s fire breathing madness.
I opened my mouth to say the words I needed to say. Yes, I did it. Yes, I’m sorry. But they stalled somewhere in my throat while my heart hammered and my mother loomed.
Lita wasn’t consumed by love for any of her children but some were tolerated more than others. I was the least of all Savage offspring to her. I knew it. Monty knew it too. That might have been the reason for what happened next. In the midst of the wild scene, of crying siblings and a vengeful parent, he calmly stepped up, that stone-faced ten-year-old kid, and said, “I fucking did it. So there. And fuck you, Lita.”
I look at my brother now - my damaged, prideful big brother - and wonder how different his life might have turned out if he’d been born to a normal family.
I could easily wonder the same about the rest of us. Surely gentle Ava wouldn’t have been swallowed by the scandalous Hollywood party scene, Brigitte wouldn’t be desperately searching for a fame she considered her birthright; I wouldn’t be a skeptical escape artist. And Spence…well, maybe Spence alone had enough strength of character to be who he was always going to be. Somehow I can’t imagine him as anything other than a modern cowboy haunting an obscure desert outpost.
It doesn’t matter now.
We are who we are.
A bubble of anxiety rises in my gut as I realize once again that we have sold our souls with this show. But there’s no backing out at this point. Gary and his corporate minions are expecting a train wreck. And the world will see what it wants to see.
“I’ve guess I should go unpack,” I tell my brother.
Monty nods vaguely and stares out the window toward the house. A few hundred yards away I see Spencer riding a brown mare at a lazy walk, seemingly oblivious to the pair of cameras trained on him.
“Need any help carrying your shit?”
I shake my head. “Nah. I didn’t bring much.”
He gives me a penetrating stare. “You up for this, Ren? I can derail the whole damn thing if you want.”
I do. This is a mistake. I know it. Monty knows it. But I think about Ava and Alden, of Bree and her desperate hopes. And I just can’t.