On that tender note I slam my way into the house.  Brigitte’s startled face is the first thing I see because she’s scooted a chair right next to the door, pretending to be immersed in her phone while discreetly listening to the conversation on the front porch.

She calls my name but I ignore her and head for the kitchen.  My mouth feels like it’s layered with mesquite bark.  I fill a glass with water from the sink even though the tap water tastes like warm sulfur out here. When I’m gulping it back, ignoring the awful taste, I catch sight of a camera that had been installed just above the sink.  I’d stopped noticing it days ago but now the empty stare of the black lens infuriates me so I rip it right out of the wall.  A few errant wires trail from its guts so I stuff the whole thing into the very back of the freezer, slamming the stainless steel door shut.

“Like that’ll do anything,” Brigitte snorts from the doorway.  She wafts into the room, grabs an apple from a bowl in the center of the table and flashes me a bemused glance.  “They’ll just put it back tomorrow.  Besides, there are about a hundred and seventy five more of them sewn into the walls of the house.  I’ll bet someone will still be picking hidden cameras out of the eaves fifty years after we’re dead.  By the way, big sister, you look like the proverbial cat who ate the canary.”

I empty the glass and set it down in the sink.  “So I guess you’re speaking to me again?”

She takes a bite of the apple, chews and looks thoughtfully wounded before opting to answer.  “I’m choosing to overlook your occasionally aggressive nature.  After all, I know this is a stressful environment.  I also know that I have the capacity to be a terrible bitch.”

I sink down in one of the hardback chairs.  “Cut out the theatrics.  You know Bree, I have to wonder if you have to ability to stop acting even if you try.”

Another bite of the apple.  “I’m not acting right now.  I’m just being your sister.”

“Then just be my sister and stop trying to direct a script.”

She sighs, touches her left palm to her forehead.  Bree suffers from frequent migraines, one of the few things we have in common.

“Loren,” she says quietly, “why are you in the habit of forgetting that I’m on your side?”

“Why are you in that habit of behaving as if you are starring in a vivid mini-series about your own life?”

“I don’t even know what that means.”

“Yes you do.  It means I have to watch my back lest I get broadsided by your ambitions.”

The hand holding the apple wilts at her side and the flash of genuine confusion in her eyes makes me wish I could take my own words back.  I’ve been wishing that a lot lately.  Someone really ought to muzzle me.

We’re turning on each other.  Or maybe it’s all me, turning on everyone. 

She shakes her head, catching onto my meaning.  “Ren, I didn’t tell them anything they didn’t already know.”

I close my eyes.  “Really?”

“No, I really didn’t!  If you want to know how it went down, well, okay. Gary asked.  Repeatedly.   Like he already knew everything about you and Oscar but was looking for someone to go on record with it.  But that someone wasn’t me.”

“You could have warned me, Brigitte.  You could have warned me that his name had come up.”

“Ren, why did you ever fool yourself into thinking it wouldn’t?”  She sighs.  “You’re right though.  I should have said something. But I thought if I did-“

“You thought I’d back out of the show.”

She lowers her head.  “Yes.”  After a long exhale she swallows and meets my eyes.  “I’m sorry, okay?  But I swear, the day he showed up I was as shocked to see him as you were.”

“Oh, I doubt anyone was as shocked to see him as I was.”

Bree scrunches up her nose and starts to say something before changing her mind and shutting her mouth.

“What do you want to say?”

Brigitte slides her lithe body into the chair across from me.  “I never even knew exactly what happened between you guys.  None of us really did.  I mean, we all knew you were together.  We knew Lita was simmering to a slow boil over it.  But the things she said about him, they couldn’t all have been true, right?”

The flashback to that night is visceral.  The smell of smoke, the feel of Oscar inside of me, my mother’s hand slapping my face hard enough to bring a trickle of blood to my nose.  Threats, promises, screaming, desolation.  And finally, emptiness.

“No, Bree,” I assure my sister.  “They weren’t all true.”

But it didn’t matter.  Not then, and certainly not now.  Lita was pathological about her lies but her promises were another story.  She’d left me with the cruelest choice she could think of.  But then, that was the idea.

“I figured as much,” says Brigitte with a wise nod.  Funny how I always think of my sisters as very young, even though I’m only a year older than Ava and barely two years older than Brigitte.

My sister winds the end of her brilliant red hair around a forefinger with a troubled expression.   It’s eerie how much she resembles Margaret O’Leary, film goddess from the last century.  She has the kind of face loved by the camera.  Suddenly her eyebrows knit together.  “I should probably tell you something.  The other day, that parasite Cate Camp let her guard down and said something about the show having some contact with Lita.  She realized right away she’d made a mistake mentioning her and started falling all over herself to cover it up, telling some spontaneous lie about how Lita was demanding that her name be kept out of the show altogether.”

The sound of my mother’s name is a sour one and I feel my face scrunching up. “I thought that was always the idea.  But escaping publicity doesn’t really sound like Lita.”

“I didn’t think so either but who knows?  I haven’t heard from her in over two years, not since I turned eighteen.  She didn’t even want to know about it when Ava had her baby.  Supposedly she’s holed up in her mansion in Beverly Hills, waiting for her meal ticket to stop breathing so she can enjoy the fruits of California’s community property laws.  God, she’s a bitch.”

I find it hard to picture my mother.  The last time I saw her was the morning of my father’s funeral three years ago.  We didn’t even speak that day.  “Gary and his minions swore from the beginning that there wouldn’t be any Lita.  It’s the one condition I had, although now I realize I should have added a few more.”

“Hmmph,” grunts Brigitte.

“What’s that mean?”

She wets her lips and leans across the table.  “Did you get an attorney, Ren?  One who wasn’t on Gary’s payroll to look over the show contract?”

I hadn’t.  I couldn’t exactly afford to retain an entertainment lawyer so when Gary offered to have his legal team broker the arrangement I didn’t come up with a reason to turn it down.  “No,” I admit slowly.

Brigitte slumps down with a grimace.  “Me either.”

“So what are you worried about exactly?”

“I don’t know.  But I also don’t really know what the hell it is I signed.”

I can’t really make myself care about the show or the contract or whoever might be listening to us at this point. Once upon a time I used to flatter myself that I was the sensible sister.  In reality, I’m just a scabbed wound, so closed off that simple honesty is a foreign language.

Bree seems to sense my thoughts.  “He could have been colluding with Gary from the beginning.  Who knows, maybe it was even Oscar who started feeling around to see if there was any tabloid interest in the half-forgotten Savage family.  I imagine there must have been something there, a desire for revenge or whatever.  I know it’s been a long time and you guys were just kids but time does funny things to people.”

Of course I’d thought of that the minute he showed up.  Oscar hadn’t exactly been forthcoming about the circumstances surrounding his sudden arrival.  He danced around difficult questions with course teasing and watched me with those dark, inscrutable eyes.   And then tonight…