Coldwater. Diana Gould

He turned to me. “Could you write in Hawaii?”

      A few months after Jonathan and I had begun working together, we’d all gone to Hawaii. Julia was eight. The two weeks we’d spent there as a family were among the happiest any of us had ever known. Julia’s delight at the Oz-like underwater wonders she saw while snorkeling was contagious; the world seemed wondrous through her eyes. I loved to tell her bedtime stories, her body snuggled next to mine as she thrilled to the adventures of Susie-Q, a character I made up. We ate meals together, saw sights together, played and ate and laughed together. After Julia fell asleep, Jonathan and I made long languorous love on crisp hotel sheets that were rumpled in the morning by the tumult of our desire. When we got back from that vacation, I’d moved in. In Hawaii, we’d become a family.

      “Sure.” Julia squealed with delight. She high-fived Jonathan then me, while Jonathan’s eyes twinkled.

      I knew I was never going to say a word.

      * * *

      In bed that night, Jonathan pulled me close.

      One thing that had gotten Jonathan and me through everything and anything was sex. From the first day we met, it was as if we were pulled together by some cellular magnet, a tug of longing, for connection, possession. Hurt feelings, misunderstandings, all could be subsumed in our body’s need for one another. We could always turn to each other in bed and find something that made everything else less important.

      Now, I recoiled from his touch. I felt dead inside; worse, detached and removed. I did not want to be reached at my deepest recess; I needed to keep that place hidden from now on. Even having a secret had to be kept a secret.

      “What is it, babe?”

      I reached for him, clasping him in my arms and legs, and tried to will myself to respond with the passion he’d come to expect. I tried to use the heat from our bodies to quell the images that came whenever I closed my eyes: a woman changing her tire by the side of the road as I struck her and careened past. I tried to respond as if there were only the two of us in bed, but Rosa Aguilar was there between us.

      I wanted to go to the funeral but didn’t dare. I sent flowers instead and included some cash, in small bills.

      Honestly, I didn’t think I’d get away with it. Every time the phone rang, every time a door opened, I thought it would be the police. But it never was. I was the only one who knew that there was an uncrossable barrier between me and the rest of the world; that everyone else was on one side, and I on the other.

      CHAPTER 4

      Cut to, exterior, beach, day. Tufts of white clouds billow in a bright blue winter sky. The sun is high and white, the ocean glassy and smooth. The tide unfurls carpets of foam as sandpipers scamper at its edge. A woman stands at the shoreline looking out to sea trying to work up the nerve to walk in.

      I hadn’t had a drink yet that day, and it had been almost five hours since I’d awakened, or come to. But the craving was intense, and I knew that any minute now I would smoke a joint, or take a Xanax, and then think, oh, just one to take the edge off—and one more time I’d wake to find myself caked in vomit, or soaked in urine, or next to a man whose name I didn’t know, promising myself that today would be different.

      I had long since lost house, home, and family. It took so many drugs in ever increasing quantities to blot out the memory of Rosa that I’d lost whatever ability I’d had to write scripts that made any sense. Jonathan had no choice but to replace me—on the show and, not long after, in his life. No longer fettered by the need to function, I hurtled into darkness. I spent days and nights in behavior so noxious that the only solace I could find was in removing myself from anyone or anything good.

      And yet somehow, a few weeks ago, I’d run into Gerry Talbot, a director I’d once worked with. He was shooting a film in Toronto and needed someone to stay in his house and water his plants. God knows why he thought he could trust me, but he had, and I’d jumped at the chance. Gerry lived in a spectacular beachfront home in Malibu, and I was unemployable, $180,000 in debt, and sleeping on my dealer’s sofa. A show-runner who could no longer run the show. This gave me a place to stay and a car to drive—mine had been repossessed—but most importantly, I thought that living at the beach would be the chance I’d been looking for to finally clean up and get my act together.

      And yet—and yet. Every day I’d wake with the same resolve, but before long, I’d take that drink, and often that was the last thing I could remember. I’d come to behind the wheel of Gerry’s Range Rover, with no memory of where I’d been, heart jack-hammered at the thought that I might once more have done what only I knew I’d done before.

      Since I could not stop drinking, nor prevent its consequences, my only recourse was to stop waking up.

      I put one foot tentatively in the water. It was icy cold. You’ll get used to it, I told myself, Just walk in. I was barefooted, in jeans and t-shirt, and even though I had a sweater wrapped around me, I shivered in the bright winter sun. I tried to urge myself onward but couldn’t take the next step. Maybe if I were drunk, I could do this. I’ll drink, and this time I won’t try to stop, I just have to remember to get back here and walk in.

      But I knew I couldn’t trust myself even to do that. Oh, God, help me. What was the matter with me?

      “Brett!”

      A young woman came towards me, negotiating the sand awkwardly in her chunky platform boots. She wore a high-cut denim skirt which showed off her long legs, tights with the kind of holes in them that used to be cause for throwing them out but which now made them more expensive, and a blousy spaghetti strap top revealing a thin collarbone leading to narrow shoulders and delicate arms. A tattoo of a serpent coiled round a rose on the top of her arm. It was only those big doe eyes and the juxtaposition of the beauty mark next to the chicken pox scar on her cheek that allowed me to recognize her at all.

      “Julia?”

      Had it been that long? She’d still been a child when I knew her, but her slender body had softened and curved; she was becoming a young woman. Her hair was cut well, in a subtle, expensive haircut that showed its natural wave to good effect; her skin was clear of any lines or blemishes.

      If I’d thought I was dead inside, the sight of Julia proved me wrong. Like the wings of a great bird taking flight, I felt a wild surge of—could it be joy?—opening in my chest. It lasted only a heartbeat, and then it was gone. But for a moment I remembered what it was like to live in a world with good in it. A tide of love and loss overtook me, powerful as the wave I’d hoped to die in a moment before, from the time when I was her mother, and life seemed to work. I longed to hug her, but held back, paralyzed by my own unworthiness.

      “Brett. I need to talk to you.”

      “How did you find me?”

      She looked puzzled, as if I’d seen her, and told her where I was staying. It was a look I was used to, on the faces of people who assumed I’d remember moments we’d spent together while I was in an alcoholic blackout. But surely, if I’d seen Julia, I would remember.

      Wouldn’t I?

      I ransacked my memory of the nights before, but there were hours, days, of lost time, when I truly had not known where I’d been or what I’d done.

      “Did I tell you?” I asked tentatively.

      But I thought I saw relief in her eyes. “My dad told me you were house-sitting for Gerry Talbot.”

      “How did he know?”

      In her face, I could see the dimpled cheek and chin of Jonathan, also the delicate bone structure and pale, haunting beauty of her “real” mother, the shiksa goddess Jonathan thought I might be but wasn’t.

      “Maybe Gerry told him? I overheard him talking to someone about it on the phone, and I asked him.”

      “Who was he talking to?”

      What must I look like to her? My clothes hung off