Hidden Bodies (34 page)

And there are more e-mails, here’s one from Barry Stein. He wants to know when Forty became
so fucking funny yet also so goddamn original, are people saying Tarantino? This feels like
Tarantino
and that compliment is mine. I
wrote
these scripts and here’s one, someone at CAA, someone who wants to know how he came up with this
CAGE! TRAPPING THAT GIRL IN
THE CAGE AFTER THAT BEACHY WEEKEND, TO GO FROM THE BEACH TO THE CAGE. FUCKING AMAZING FUNNY TWISTED SHIT MISTER MAN YOU ARE GOD. HOLY FUCK ALSO CAN WE GET BACK TO THE THIRD TWIN? BECAUSE HOW DOES
YOUR BRAIN GO THERE AND HERE?

Outside, you can see that Forty has drunk his own Kool-Aid and crossed over to the dark side
.
He believes it, all of it, he brainwashed himself with compliments and coke, hookers and
agents. And he didn’t even come up with the fucking title—Captain Dave did
.
Outside, Love gets all hoppy and bouncy when “Love Is a Battlefield” begins to play and
she is correct. This is war.

I go upstairs and step into Love’s giant shower. I have to believe in myself. I will fix this. I try to have my own celebration. People said those things about me even if they think they
were saying those things about Forty. But then I think of the way my neck ached, the way I wrote at Intelligentsia and suffered through those other people around me, the motherfuckers with MacBook
attitudes and loud voices—
So I just had a meeting about directing that McDonald’s commercial and I’m thinking I might just do it
—and it was me slaving, rushing like
a mad man to my PO Box to keep up my cover, the bookselling business that
Forty
suggested as a way to allay suspicions of my being a
gold digger.
The door opens. It’s
Love.

“Hey,” she says. “Got room for me?”

I nod and all this time, I was concerned about the wrong man. I wasted my time worrying about Milo when I should have been keeping eyes on Forty. Milo was never a threat. He loves Love and she
doesn’t love him back and most of the time in life, I’m starting to realize, love is not the problem. It’s the people like Forty, like Amy, like Beck, the people who are loveless.
And it’s possible to know this right away. Forty labeled me
Old Sport
because he didn’t want me to have a name. It is possible to know people. They show you who they are. You
just have to be looking.

Love says if I still want to be a writer, Forty could give me pointers and I love her too much to tell her the truth. They were in the womb together. They remember the ’80s together. They
were born together and they will take it to the grave together.

Just the same, I step out of the shower. I text Forty:
We need to talk.

FORTY
never wrote back, not just to me. He didn’t write back to Love or his mother or his father or Milo. He fell off the face of the fucking
earth, which is odd behavior for someone who just scored a two-picture deal. His absence is a wrecking ball and Love is a tired, brittle, worried mess and
this
is what I cannot allow. I
can’t let him do this to her, to us. He can steal all my scripts. Fine. But he can’t torture Love. She knew right away what he was up to. Four days ago, eight hours after I texted him,
she made a declaration: “I’m calling it,” she said. “He’s not sick. He didn’t break his phone. He’s on a bender.”

Love’s parents came over, worried, pacing.
Are we sure he isn’t in Malibu? What about that loft downtown he bought a while back?
Dottie is such a mother. She didn’t
want to think it was a bender. “I’m sure he’s off celebrating,” she insisted. “Don’t jump to the worst conclusion.”

“Celebrating with who?” Love asked. “Mom, I won’t jump to conclusions but please don’t go into denial already.”

Ray told Love not to get so worked up. “He’s thirty-five years old,” he said. “He’s not a baby.”

They left and I tried to make Love feel better but it was impossible. “I
hate
the way they go into denial,” she said. “He’s my twin and I know when
something’s wrong. He goes on benders.”

Love texted his dealer, Slim, but the text bounced back. She threw her phone down. “Fucking Forty,” she snapped. “Of course his fucking drug dealer has a new fucking number.
That’s what they do! They’re drug dealers.”

That was four days ago and Forty is officially on a bender. He hasn’t answered calls or texts or e-mails and he is an even bigger asshole than I realized
.

“I miss him so much I feel crazy,” she says when we wake up. “I literally feel like I’m going crazy.”

“Me too,” I say, but she blows up at me. She’s in a terrible mood, worse every day, and whatever I say is wrong. And she doesn’t know that he fucked me over and I have to
sit in this house and pretend to care about him, pretend that I’m not sitting here in shock.

There’s a knock on the door.

“Babies?” It’s Love’s mom. Again. Because this is how it is now. They show up in the morning and they’re here puttering around all day, all night. “Are you
decent?”

“Yes!” Love shouts, with no regard for my morning wood.

Dottie comes into the room and flops onto the bed. “Did I not love him enough? You know, your daddy and I found out about his big deal from the trades.”

Every day we go over the events. I have to listen to the same fucking conversation, with Love assuring her mother that she did most certainly love them enough. I’ve grown too familiar with
Love’s mother’s habits, the way she nervously twists her rings around her fingers, the way she brings a different purse every day even though all we do is sit in the house and
speculate. I picture her at home, in
Bel Air
, moving all her pills and credit cards and blotting papers and lipsticks from one purse into another.

Ray calls from downstairs. “I got eggs!”

Yesterday it was
I got French toasties
and the day before that it was
I got huevos rancheros
and Love gets out of bed without looking at me. She slips into her robe and helps
her mother off the bed and they walk away, telling each other how wonderful they are, how great a daughter Love is, how loving a mother Dottie is.

Downstairs, Ray tells me to have a seat and now it begins again, his questions about my business. Ray loves me. Ray wants to invest in me. Ray believes in books. Once upon a time, before Forty
got a two-picture deal and disappeared, Dottie loved me too, but now she resents me. She doesn’t like Ray treating me with such love and acceptance. She doesn’t eat her eggs. Ray sighs.
“Whatsa matter now?”

“Sometimes you don’t sound like someone whose
son
is missing,” she says. “Sometimes you sound downright chipper.”

“Pardon me for not being surprised,” he says. “I missed the memo where we were told to act as if there’s anything surprising about this mess.”

“You shut it,” she says. She looks at me, at her husband. “Have some respect for your
son
.”

Ray slams the refrigerator door shut and Forty has destroyed them. They were so happy before and the only thing that makes them stop fighting is Love, who starts crying and banging her fists and
begging them to stop. “I can’t take this! You can’t do this now, you just can’t!”

And now her mother is soothing her and her father has them both in a bear hug and they promise her it’s going to be okay. “We’ll get through this as a family, Love bug,”
he says. “We always do.”

I learn that Forty’s favorite game as a child was hide-and-seek. He never stopped playing. When things go well for him, he self-destructs. He hides. The day he got into grad school at
UCLA, he went to a racetrack and drove his car into the wall. It was an accident, but at the same time, we all know what’s possible when we get into a fucking
sports car.
Two days
before Love’s wedding, a happy time for all, Forty took off to go
skiing
via helicopter. He fell, of course, and no one could locate him for days. Love’s wedding had to be
postponed. Forty was found in the woods and he claimed he was too disoriented to use his phone. One of the guys on the rescue squad lost a
finger
trying to find him.

After breakfast, Love and I go outside so she can water her plants. “Love,” I say. “Maybe we should get out of the house, you know, go to a movie or something.”

“A
movie
?” She lashes out at me, brandishing her hose. “How can I go to a
movie
when my brother is missing?”

“Because he always turns up.”

“You don’t get it because you’re not . . . close with your family,” she says. “I don’t mean that in a bad way, but just, just please don’t say things
like
how about we go to a movie
? I need to be here. I can’t be in a movie theater and get a call that he’s . . .”

And she’s crying again, and I swear, she’s crying because she feels guilty because she wishes he would die and leave her alone already. He is tedious and he lacks imagination and he
stole from me and he is a vampire, sucking the life out of his sister. I hold her.

“Joe,” Love says. Here we go again.

“Yeah?”

“When he showed up and we found out about his deal, you didn’t look happy.”

“Love, we were in the fucking pool. We were literally
in the fucking
pool
.”

She tosses her hose. “No,” she says. “It’s not about that. You looked
mad.
”

“I wasn’t mad,” I say, and I want so badly to tell her I wrote those scripts, but if I tell her now, while Forty is gone, she will bury me.

She sprays her cactuses, as if they need water. “No,” she says. “You were definitely mad.”

I have no choice here. “Okay,” I say. “You’re right. You just told me how you’re done with the business and you don’t want to act and he walks in and he sold
his movies and I was like, well, there goes that. Now you’re gonna wanna be in his movies.”

“Because I can’t think for myself?”

“No,” I say. “Because you’re twins. Because you work together, because of course he’d want his sister to be in his movies.”

“But I literally just told you I was done with that,” she says. “I literally told you I never want to act again. Just tell me why you weren’t happy for him, why you went
off and skulked into the house. I mean, there’s
something
going on.”

“I love your brother,” I lie.

“Then why didn’t you hug him and be like
yes
?” She drops the hose. She paces. “Never mind,” she says. “This happens every time I go out with someone.
At first you act like you love my brother and it’s cool and you want to be friends but then the minute he, I don’t know,
needs
something from you, you turn your back on
him.”

“He didn’t need anything from me,” I say. “He got a fucking deal.”

“He needed you to be happy for him.” She sniffles. “He needed you to love him. I mean, why couldn’t you have just
hugged
him and been there for him? Why did you
have to run away?”

So now it’s
my
fault that Forty ran away and Love’s father is calling us in for another feeding. I try to talk to Love but she says now isn’t the time. She isn’t
the same girl she was four days ago and if this keeps up, she won’t love me anymore. She is a snowman melting, a phone dying, a plant wilting. I go inside and eat my
guac
and talk
about books with her parents and I am a limp dick. Her parents decide to go to a movie—ha!—and I don’t say
see I told you so.
They go and we’re alone and we sit on
her giant sectional and once again whatever I say is wrong.

If I tell her it’s going to be okay, she says I have no way of knowing that.

If I tell her I love her, she says she can’t deal with me right now.

If I ask her what I can do, she tells me there’s nothing anyone can do.

If I try to make her laugh, she says she doesn’t want to laugh.

If I get upset, she says she can’t deal with
one more person
losing their shit.

Her parents come back. “Any word?” Ray asks.

“No,” Love says.

Dottie tells us that it finally hit Ray. They didn’t make it to a movie theater. They just went to Forty’s condo above Sunset. They think he’s dead. They can feel it. I try to
be positive because that’s what they say to do in these situations, but it doesn’t work. I try to cheer up Ray and watch
Fast Five
with him and Love says I’m abandoning
her. I leave Ray and the movie and follow her and she snaps at me. “Well, now you’re abandoning
him.
”

I can’t cure Love when she’s sick like this, sitting in the dark with her headphones on, blocking out the world, watching things, as she was when we met, and I understand now that
she was sad that day too. She had just had sex with Milo; she was hating herself, blaming herself for leading him on. And right now, Forty is the one who ran away, and he did that, but she is
blaming herself, as if his fuck-ups are her fault. There is a codependency between twins that can’t be broken. And then I get a text.

It’s Forty.

The first thing I do is look around to make sure Love and Ray and Dottie are all far away from me and they are. I unlock my phone. I read:
Feel like grabbing some grub, Old Sport?

Unfuckingbelievable. His family is on a vigil and he doesn’t offer any explanation. Does he not care about them? Does he not remember when he stole intellectual property from me?

I write back:
Where and when?

He writes back:
Now and the 101!

I put my hands on Love’s shoulders. She takes her headphones off and looks up at me.

“I’m going to go find Forty. I can’t just sit here and do nothing.”

She reaches out to me. “How?” she asks. “What do you even mean?”

“I mean I’ll find him,” I say. “I’ll drive around. I’ll go to his haunts.”

“Joe,” she says, brightening. “You’re amazing. Thank you.”

“You don’t need to say that,” I say, and I kiss her hand. “You’re the amazing one and the least I can do is get in the car and try and bring him home.”