Page 19 of The Starfish Sisters

Sweat soaks my back, and exasperated, I fling the covers off my body and turn on the lamp by my bed. It casts deep shadows in the corners, and I get up to turn the overhead light on, too. Compulsively—I know it’s compulsive and yet I can’t stop, which is I guess the definition—I round the entire house turning on lights and opening closet doors to make sure they’re empty of malevolent humans. I check the doors. All locked and bolted. Yul Brynner tags along, curious, his tail in the air.

I thought it would be better here, but it appears my anxiety has followed me, fully clothed, after finding the squirrel.

Assured of momentary safety, I go to the kitchen and turn on the kettle. When Phoebe and I were in our early twenties, I lived in LA and she was going to art school in Seattle, so both of us were swamped and unsure of where our lives were going. We kept our connection by sharing books and ideas via letters and the rare, expensive phone call.One of the books we read was about tea, the multitudes of styles and ceremonies, and we spent the entire year experimenting with various infusions, and black and green teas. Both of us now eschew coffee for the more nuanced (in our opinion) layers of tea.

My stock is a bit weary, but I find an herbal blend of chamomile and peach bits. The scent eases my tension, and I stand at the counter waiting for it, looking down the dark coast. A light is on in the studio, but I know Phoebe must have left it on. She wouldn’t leave Jasmine alone.

The light serves to reveal the space, however: the big table in the middle of the room, the easels, the faded carpet. The windows must be new, because I don’t remember them being so clear or solid.

On the table is artwork of some kind, but I can’t see the details from here. The sight of it makes me ache, ache for the sense of belonging I found there, with Beryl and Phoebe, and sometimes Joel.

Joel. Being here makes me miss him, even if it’s been decades since we were so forcibly parted. I wonder where he is, how his life has unfolded after he went to juvie for burning down my dad’s church. It couldn’t have been easy for him as a youth of color, in what basically amounted to prison for teens.

I move my head in a circle, loosening my neck. Joel. My father. That terrible—

No. There are enough issues I need to resolve without going back to all that.

But maybe I should go back to painting and drawing. Beryl taught both Phoebe and me, and while art became her career and I haven’t picked up a pencil to draw in decades, I did always enjoy it. Not as a career—early on, I knew I wanted to act. We thought we would move to New York City and find an apartment and become famous and always stay best friends.

I did go to New York. Phoebe went to Seattle for art school, but never finished. By then, I’d spent years in school plays and had an eye toward Broadway.

Instead, a casting director for a new movie saw me in a waiting room and asked if I’d come to LA to test for a part. Which turned out to be the lead in a movie about a young woman striving against all odds to outwit her brutal father and live a bigger life in eighteenth-century England. It had been a wildly popular novel, and the search for the right person to play the part had been all over entertainment news. Phoebe and I had hotly discussed it several times ourselves, but neither of us dreamed it would be me.

But I brought everything I had to the role, and was uniquely prepared, after all. It was a hit. My career was made.

Just like that, people said. So lucky. Everybody loves a pretty girl.

Phoebe dropped out of art school in her third year to get married. We fought about it for months, with me pleading for her to at least finish and her insisting she really wasn’t good enough to be a fine artist and retreating into the arms of the admittedly gorgeous but awful Derek, her husband and Stephanie’s father. Everything I predicted about him and how he’d wreck her life turned out to be true, but I would never say that to her.

Although, really, I guess I had, in that last, spectacular fight.

Sipping my tea, cat winding around my feet, I’m okay. I’m back in my body, not my memories. When the phone buzzes on the counter, I jump three feet.

It can only be one person. No one else can get through.

“Phoebe,” I say, answering with a sense of relief. “What are you doing awake at two a.m.?”

“I could ask you the same question.”

“I don’t really sleep anymore,” I say. “What tea are you drinking?”

“Rose tulsi with honey. You?”

“Chamomile peach.”

A little pool of quiet falls between us. “Are you okay?” she asks. “I see that every single light in the house is on.”

“Uh.” I glance over my shoulder, and it’s true. “It makes me feel safer. It’s really quiet up here.”

“Do you want to come down here and spend the night?”

A swell of hope fills my body. “Really?”

“Yeah. Let me call Ben and he’ll bring you down.”

“Oh, no no no. I’ll walk.”

“Really?” Her voice is droll. “In the dark? Alone? In the middle of the night?”