Page 28 of Dark Ugly Places

I step back, my whole body shaking, and brace the countertop. I shut my eyes.

She’s there. A bright, unearthly presence awakening inside of me like a sleeping child. She yawns and stretches. My body quivers as she takes form.

In the mirror, I lift my eyes to really look at the woman staring back at me. It’s me, and yet it is not me. Her face is familiar. I know her. She’s someone I have been before. She emerges, gentle at first, and then stronger, like a deep interior itch I cannot resist.

Hello, she whispers to me. It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I blink once and try to resist her, to push her away, my head and body no longer my own, and then everything goes dark.

12

Bambi

Bambi presses on the accelerator and feels the sand crunch between her toes, the dampness from the sea air still on her skin. She brushes a loose hair out of her face, sticky with hairspray and serum to create unnatural beach waves. She never moved to LA for the beaches. She’d forgotten until the shoot how much she despised Venice Beach in particular because of the drugs, the tourists, and street vendors selling worthless crap. At a stoplight, she pauses and sniffs her left arm, the smell of the spray tan pungent like overripe fruit. She lowers the windows, and when the light turns, she presses firmly on the gas. Outside, the air is calm and fragrant with the jasmine that grows along this patch of Sunset Boulevard.

She takes a sharp curve on Sunset and hears the wheels screech a little beneath her, then revs her Porsche and dials Jason. No answer.

“Shit,” she mutters.

She presses on the accelerator a little more and speeds up past the next light as it turns red.

Bambi’s stomach rolls, and she curses quietly to herself as she takes a corner up into their part of Beverly Hills. She speeds, her engine revving as she winds uphill toward 1900 North Alpine Drive.

A red stop sign zips past her, and she glances in her rearview mirror. No cops out tonight. She’s going to be fine. Probably. As she speeds toward home, Bambi regrets lingering on set with the photographer and the other models after the shoot. She should have said no, but she enjoyed the moments after they wrapped, sitting beneath the stars, watching the beach crowd start to clear, glancing now and then at some of the photos on the monitor, a can of something sweet and sparkly in hand that she wasn’t really drinking. She allowed the thought to enter her mind that maybe she didn’t want to go home.

Before she moved to LA, she had been doing quite well on her own. Sports Illustrated. Vanity Fair. Vogue. Marie Claire. She was the face of Lancôme, a good campaign that had her staring smilingly over every drug store makeup aisle she went into. It’s not that Bambi liked modeling exactly, but it was something she could do, a thing she discovered about herself when she was sixteen and past her awkward stage of short hair and gangly, Swedish features. Somehow, at seventeen, she had found that her hair, now slightly longer and more blonde from the sun, and her limbs, which before were boyish and too slim, had a certain quality to them that others found desirable.

Near enough to her eighteenth birthday, she had a terrible tonsil infection and couldn’t eat solids for a week. The weight she lost was the final piece of the puzzle, and when it was spring, and she was just about old enough, Bambi set out for New York to stay with a friend and try to get some work. About eight years later, she met Jason and moved to Los Angeles, a lesser place for a successful model but somehow appropriate, nonetheless. He was alluring to her beyond his fame, but the fame part was nice, too. Being around cameras wasn’t the least bit unusual to her. So she moved into Jason’s house, redecorated every bedroom herself to fit her clean, Scandinavian aesthetic, and before long, Jason proposed, and they were married.

These days, the serious work had all but dried up. She did things like lipstick campaigns and the occasional indie designer, but it wasn’t like before. LA people were brazen when it came to measuring one’s success. Everyone here saw her a little differently, a little bruised, as though she occupied a lesser tier of fame. In their guest bedroom, she still kept a few old magazines in the wardrobe and on the bottom of the nightstand, in which she was featured or had graced the covers.

Bambi checks her Rolex as she turns up Maple and begins winding into the hills. It’s 12:16 a.m. She takes a moment before pulling into the driveway. What should she say? How to handle him? Beyond the stone wall gates and their tall affronting metallic door, Jason is already inside, a glass of Macallan in his hands, lulling him and rousing him at the same time, or perhaps he is swimming in the pool, doing his laps for the evening.

Bambi throws the car back into gear and presses the garage remote. It opens slowly and quietly, revealing Jason’s pristine white Wraith inside. She pulls in, then turns to reverse in next to it, cautiously, checking every mirror and every angle. Once, she opened her door and hit the edge of the Wraith, leaving a small dent in the side. She had it fixed before Jason had a chance to notice.

For a moment, she waits in the darkness of her parked car, her mind racing with possibilities. Jason calm. Jason swimming. Jason drinking too much. Jason shouting. A spark here. A hand there. Bambi pulls down her mirror and checks herself, reapplies some lipstick, and smacks her lips together. She tries on a smile to herself and lifts her eyes into an expression she thinks Jason might want to see. The effort exhausts her. Bambi’s face falls, and her smile evaporates.

An idea crosses her mind, one she had not considered before.

Bambi finds her spare stash of pills in her purse in a tiny, gold compass-like compact that used to be her mother’s. The coldness of the compact takes her back for a moment—her mother’s short blonde hair, the stern expression she’d use when Bambi had done something foolish or broken the rules. The compact is the only thing she has left of her. The mirror has long since shattered and broken. The place where powder once sat now long chiseled away to an empty compartment where Bambi keeps various pills she might need. Tylenol. Energy vitamins. The occasional hit of Molly. And Ambien. She picks out one little blue pill and cradles it in her palm, the fake tan spray still prominent. For some reason, the little blue oval staring back at her makes her heart stop racing.

The air inside the house is cool and still, like a mausoleum. Bambi kicks off her sandals in the foyer and groans softly at the ache in her legs from standing most of the day in awkward positions and jumping repeatedly on the hot sand to capture the exuberance the photographer wanted. The kitchen is dark, except for a slit of moonlight coming through the breakfast nook windows. The refrigerator hums quietly.

Bambi goes to it, hungry and dehydrated. She scans the insides of the fridge—plenty of food, food that Lucita has been stocking and restocking for her on rotation. Everything is fresh, and her mouth waters for the things she hasn’t eaten in weeks. Eggs. Milk. Bread. Cheese. Bacon. Chocolate.

Bambi grabs a bottle of water and lets the door close, her hands shaking.

Behind her, at the far end of the house, she peers toward the backyard and the pool, where a soft glow of blue light emanates through the rest of the dark house. The back doors are open, she realizes, a soft breeze coming in and the faint scent of Jason’s cologne—musk and peppermint—filtering in. She goes to him, stepping carefully along the large stones embedded in the grass that lead to the edge of the pool.

Bambi sits as he finishes a lap and comes up for a breath. “Hi,” she says as he notices her. “Did you just get home?”

Jason swims toward her, and Bambi sees he has the Macallan out next to a glass. He takes a swig, watching her, then lifts himself out of the pool to sit on the edge. “I’ve been waiting for you, Bambs.”

She swallows, a slight uptick in her heart rate. “I know. I’m sorry. We finished late. The photographer wanted to get some extra shots.”

Silence. Jason pulls a towel from the lounger behind him to dry himself. Bambi looks at the curve of his chest and back, the muscles knitting together at the top of his shoulders.

“How was your meeting?”

“Long. Exhausting. I didn’t even get my massage in.”