14
TATUM
MARCH 2005
Piper calls with the news while I’m in hair and makeup for Scrubs. It’s nothing glamorous, a guest star as a college student who comes down with shingles, but the exposure is good, and it’s another line for my résumé. Since The O.C., the work has been steady, though not swift, nothing so lucrative and assuring that I’ve wanted to quit P. F. Chang’s. Well, I always want to quit P. F. Chang’s, but I still take a shift now and then, and I still stop in on Thursdays to keep Mariana company or sometimes jump in for her hours if she has an audition of her own or a gig that’s come up. None of the customers recognize me, no one thinks I’m anything to double-take at. I’m not. Half the waiters have booked guest spots of their own or have made it all the way to testing for pilots. At Tisch, I was something special; in LA, I’m a slash—a bartender/actress. I have an audition next week—a period piece called On the Highlands that would shoot later in the year in Scotland—that would launch me out of the slash category, propel me into the full-time actor mode, but I’ve stopped pinning all my aspirations on every audition. There are too many nos to get invested each time.
“Pipes,” I say into my cell, holding it an inch from my cheek so I don’t mess up the shingles makeup that took two hours to perfect at six o’clock this morning. “Not the best time.”
I can tell that something’s awry before she even speaks. Maybe it’s in the way she inhales or the way that she hiccups or just the way that sisters who have been through so much together can intuit one another, even when thousands of miles apart.
“Piper,” I say. “What’s wrong?”
“I know you don’t want to hear about this,” she says, her voice breaking, then dropping into a whisper. “But I don’t know who else to call.”
“You call me,” I say. “You can tell me anything.” I forget about the painstaking makeup and press the phone to my ear, like that somehow brings us closer.
“It’s Dad.”
I already know, once she has said this, why I was the one she didn’t want to call. Other children might worry about car accidents or heart attacks or some sort of unfortunate accident befalling their solitary living parent, but not me, not us. We’ve lived through this too many times.
“What did he do?” I ask. I don’t want to hear this, I don’t want to pick up more pieces. I want a mother who is alive and a father who is sober, and if I had to swap one for the other, my mom should be here, not him. It’s a horrible thought. I stare into the illuminated mirror in the makeup trailer and actually think this—That is a horrible thought—but it’s true, and it’s not like I haven’t thought it before. When she was going through chemo, and he coped with whiskey: It should be you, not her. When we buried her, and he showed up at our childhood home’s door, sober but not exactly put together: Why her, not you?
And now again.
“Scooter found him passed out on the side of the road last night. Held him for the night, called me this morning when Dad had woken up.”
Scooter Smith was Piper’s high school boyfriend. They’d split just before college—she’d gone to Ohio University, and he headed to Wisconsin for football—but they were still friendly, the types who sometimes had a beer together if they’d run into each other earlier in the day, sometimes slept with each other if one beer turned into four. He was a deputy sheriff, thought about being mayor someday, which you’d really never, ever expect if you’d known him back in high school. Still kind of didn’t expect now. But I was sitting in a makeup chair playing a college junior with shingles, so what did I know?
“Bail?” I say. “Do you need bail money?”
“Tatum!” she snaps. “No, Scooter let him out, but I mean, we need to get him help.”
“Again. We need to get him help again,” I say, just as a production assistant hustles into the trailer and barks: “Tatum Connelly, you’re up in five. Tatum Connelly, five minutes.”
“Don’t say ‘again’ like we’ve had to do this a million times,” Piper says.
“How many times then?” I nod to the PA, and mouth Wrapping this up, and he answers me by marching out and slamming the door.
“Three,” she sighs. “OK? Three times. Does that make you happy?”
“Of course it doesn’t make me happy, Piper!”
“Well, it doesn’t make me happy either. But you’re out there in fancy Los Angeles; I’m here sitting in the shit trying to clean it up. So please stop giving me a hard time and help.”
“Fine. How can I help?” I say, kinder now. “Is it money?” I don’t really have any money but Ben has plenty, and what’s his is mine. Theoretically. We didn’t sign a prenup; he didn’t even mention a prenup, and he takes care of me in the ways he expects a husband to provide for his wife. But I still haven’t quite adjusted to having a safety net. Thus, the Thursday shifts at the bar. Also, the (modest) checking account I opened shortly after I landed The O.C. gig last year, splitting my paycheck between our savings and, well, now my savings. Ben wouldn’t have cared if I’d told him. But I didn’t. I’d planned to, the night that I went to the bank, and now I can’t even remember why I didn’t; maybe I’d fallen asleep while he was working late or maybe he’d done something that irritated me, or maybe I’d just wanted something for myself when my husband seemingly had everything else. Either way, my checking account won’t fund my dad’s rehab, but Ben could. Ben would. Happily.
“Not money,” Piper says. “Well, I mean, maybe some money. But I want him at an in-patient facility. No more do-it-yourself patchwork sobriety.”
Do-it-yourself patchwork sobriety was my dad’s specialty.
“I’ll ask around, Pipes, OK?”
The makeup artist’s walkie springs to life. I’m needed on set.
“Why don’t you come home?” Piper asks, her voice shaking.
“I can’t just come home.”
“Because you’re a big, important person now?”
“Hardly. But I’m working. And we adopted the dog, and Ben is out of town half the time, and Monster weighs a hundred pounds and isn’t exactly well trained, and I can’t just take him on the plane with me.”
The makeup artist says: “Tatum, they’re ready for you.”
Also, there is nothing I’d rather do less than go home. Home is cobwebs and ghosts and memories of my mother, who should be here. Home is discomfort and high school awkwardness and working at the pharmacy or at Albertsons while other girls were cheerleaders and going to homecoming dances. Home is my dad drinking a case of Coors Light in one sitting and us tiptoeing in the kitchen the mornings of his hangovers so we don’t wake him and have to smell his puke. Home is our back garden, which my mom nurtured once my dad left but now holds her ashes. So even that had turned to literal dust. I’d do just about anything other than return home.
“Bring him here, Piper,” I say rashly, without thinking it through, my mind already on the set, on to nailing the role so I’ll get something better, something bigger, something that will take me further from who I used to be. “Just . . . get on a plane and bring him here. We’ll figure it out together.”
We drive him down to a thirty-day dry-out clinic that weekend. Ben has made some calls, asked for favors, and we found him a bed at Commitments, a no-nonsense facility whose motto is Commit to Yourself, Commit to Life, Commit to Your Sobriety. Piper and my dad sit in the back, Ben drives with his knuckles turning white against the steering wheel, and I stare out the window at the rush of palm trees and desert that whips by.
“You won’t have to do this again,” my dad says as we flank him in the lobby, as a kind nurse with huge fake breasts and adhesive eyelashes pats him on the shoulder and prepares to walk him to his room.
I chew on my lip and say nothing.
“I know I have failed you,” he says, crying now. “It’s not like I don’t know it. It’s not like I’m not ashamed.”
Piper hugs him. “We’re all fallible, Dad, it’s OK.”
I want to scream: We are not all fallible, not in the ways that he is. But I do not.
He says: “I just miss her so much, your mom. And I shouldn’t have found the answer in the bottle, I know that. I’m stupid. It was stupid, I hate myself.”
Piper takes his hand. “We’ll get you through this, Dad. I’m sure you can stay here as long as you need. Can he take your guest room after?”
“Our guest room?” I repeat. We hadn’t discussed plans after this, but this certainly was not part of it. No, my dad would return home with Piper, get back to work, get back to his own life. But I can’t say this now, as we’re checking him in to dry out. I can’t set him up for failure before he’s even started. “We’ll see. OK? Let’s just see.”
“It would help him recalibrate, get away from his triggers,” she says.
“I said we’ll see.”
She nods. Ben narrows his eyes, starts to say something, then does not. It occurs to me that it’s his guest room too, that he’ll want a say. But Ben is always benevolent; of course he’ll offer for him to stay.
The nice nurse with enormous breasts says, “OK, well, family is welcome next weekend, in seven days. If you head to the desk around the corner, they’ll give you all the information.”
And then she nods to my father, who is so defeated and looks so much like a broken little child, and ushers him through the swinging door, which eases back into the frame and latches.
Piper starts crying, and I stand there, my hands flanking my hips, my brain drifting to all the ways I want this moment to be different, like I’m in a movie and writing my own script. Like I’m a daughter with a mom who is alive and a daughter with a father who hasn’t been a terrible disappointment. In my mind, in my new role, I’m anyone I want to be, anyone I dare to dream.
“Let’s go,” I say, unable to stand there a second longer in the muddle of the real moment. “Please, can we just get out of here?”
I spin quickly and head for the exit. They linger for a moment before following, because they are better equipped for this reality; they don’t need to write themselves into a world of make-believe to get by.