Lining your pockets with mini croissants?
Stuffing my purse full of Danishes.
Since then they’ve been volleying back and forth a dozen times a day, talking about all kinds of random things: an editorial in theTimesand their favorite movies from when they were teenagers, where to get a decent bagel in LA. She’s found herself listening for the sound of her phone vibrating, an illicit little thrill zinging through her every time she sees his name on the screen.
It doesn’t mean anything, obviously.
But she’s not sure if it means nothing, either.
“Come home soon,” she says now, blowing a kiss in Junie’s direction. June blows one back, says goodbye.
***
“I’m going to need an advance on my allowance,” Olivia announces that night, sliding pertly into her seat in the dining room. Cinta put a huge dinner together, meaning she ordered $150 worth of food from an Indian place in Agoura Hills and harangued them loudly into sending extra naan. “A friend of mine has VIP passes to Moon Landing, so.” Olivia tilts her head to the side like,You all know how it is. “I need bikinis.”
Lilly winces. “Seriously?” Moon Landing is a three-day music festival out in the desert, the cursed love child of Coachella and Burning Man. She went herself once, a few months before Joe died; in her memory it’s a blur of champagne cocktails and MDMA, everything in her suitcase caked with a fine pale layer of grit. She and Joe got into a screaming argument in the lobby of the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs that showed up on social media before they were even finished having it, the two of them hurling accusations at each other across the glittering terrazzo tile. The thought of it makes Lilly’s chest ache, like her lungs are full of sand. “That shit makes Revolve Fest look fun.”
“I mean, it’s no postmodern feminist Quebecois paleo dinner at Lodge that’s over by nine p.m., I’ll grant you,” Olivia replies sweetly, “but you gotta take your excitement where you can get it, I always say.”
“Didn’t, like, four different people get roofied there last year?” Lilly presses, looking around the table for assistance and wishing uselessly for June. It’s coming back to her now in queasy neonflashes: Joe strung out and mean and sweaty, the unceasing shriek of synth. She hasn’t let herself think about it in a long time. “And there was that thing with the porta-potties—”
“None of that happened in the VIP section, Lilly!” Olivia’s voice is shrill. “On top of which, I don’t actually remember asking for your opinion.” She turns back to their father. “Anyway! The bikinis. You can just Venmo me if you want.”
“Of course we will,” Cinta agrees immediately, even as Dominic is shoving his chair back and marching off in the direction of his rowing machine. “Do you need cover-ups, too?”
Lilly bites her tongue, reaching across the table for the korma and trying to ignore the weird, amorphous dread blooming like cactus blossoms in her chest. Her relationship with Olivia has always been like this—smooth and then prickly, hot and then cold. She thinks it’s possible Olivia reminds her too much of the person she was before Joe died—too sure of herself, too confident in the notion that nothing truly bad could ever happen. She thinks about that person sometimes and wants to shake her. Wants to say,You idiot. Take better care of what you already have.
***
After dinner she finds her dad in the gym on the second floor of the pool house just like always, the clank of dumbbells and the wail of the classic rock station echoing out across the backyard. Lilly climbs the steps and watches him for a minute before he notices her: tufts of gray chest hair poking out of his tank top, the veins in his biceps bulging as he lifts. He’s in fantastic shape—of course he’s in fantastic shape, he literally spends four and a half hours a day pumping iron—but still he’s starting to look a little bit older to her lately, though she’d never say that to him in a million years.He’d prefer to be stabbed in the heart. “Brought you a protein shake,” she says, holding up the plastic tumbler.
Her dad smiles at her in the mirror without breaking his rhythm. “You’re a sweetheart, Elisabetta,” he tells her, motioning with his chin toward the bookshelf. “You know you’ve always been my favorite daughter.”
Lilly smiles back as she sets the shaker down beside his impressive home library of workout DVDs, ignoring a tiny pang of something uneasy behind her ribs. She used to love it when her dad singled her out as special—the smartest, the most talented, the one with the best head on her shoulders—and if she’s being honest with herself there’s a part of her that can’t help but want to be his #1 girl. Still, lately something about it reminds her of what Will said that night at the premiere of Charlie’s movie.I am exactly like my sisters, she thinks again.
“Listen,” she says, sitting down on the edge of the weight bench. “About Olivia and this festival. I just don’t think it’s a good idea for you to let her—”
Right away her dad shakes his head. “Have you met your sister?” he asks pointedly. “If I tell her she can’t go she’ll just make my life a living hell until finally I give in. Better to save myself the effort.”
Lilly doesn’t know thatBetter to save myself the effortis a parenting motto to which one should necessarily aspire, but she doesn’t say that out loud. “Oh, she’ll have us all longing for the sweet embrace of death, absolutely,” she agrees. “But—”
“Besides,” her father interrupts, setting down his thirty-fives and reaching for his fifties, “Olivia is twenty-one. My role is strictly ceremonial, same as with the rest of you girls. I’m like Stanley Tucci inThe Hunger Games.”
“And just as nattily dressed,” Lilly promises; her father is nothing if not susceptible to flattery. She thinks of Caroline inviting June over to Charlie’s hoping she’d somehow embarrass herself. She thinks of Isobel DesRoche in the bathroom at the club. She thinks of the money they don’t have, the house they’re about to lose, and thinks she’ll be damned if she’s not going to try her hardest to protect Olivia and all the rest of her sisters from everything she can, up to and including their own bad decisions, whether they like it or not. “Your opinion still matters, though. She listens to you more than you think. I mean, we all do.”
“That’s very sweet of you to say, Elisabetta,” Lilly’s father tells her cheerfully, “though I think we both know it’s bullshit.” He grins at her then, winking like they’re in on something together before gesturing with a dumbbell in the direction of the stairs. “Get the hell out of my gym, would you? I’ve got thirty-eight more reps.”
Lilly hesitates. Back when they were kids they all used to clamber out of bed and run to the front door in their pajamas when he got home from the restaurant late at night; he’d swing them up in the air one by one like something out of the opening credits of a vintage TV show, all of them barefoot and giggling.I need you to remember you care about us for a second, she almost tells him.I need you to be our dad.
“Sure thing,” she says instead, then offers him a crooked smile. “Don’t hurt yourself, all right?”
“Brat,” he says, turning back to the mirror. Lilly can hear him laughing all the way back down the stairs.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Will
A week passes. The movie grinds along. They lose one full day to a freak grasshopper infestation in the craft services tent and another two when Johnny is arrested for urinating on a police car outside a gentlemen’s club in North Hollywood and spends the night in Los Angeles County lockup. Will keeps his head down, shoots his scenes.
