Michaela Brand came to see me four days later.
I work out of my house above Beverly Glen. In mid-November the whole city’spretty, nowhere more so than the Glen.
She smiled and said, “Hi, Dr. Delaware.Wow, what a great place, my name’s pronounced Mick-aah-la.”
The smile was heavy firepower in the battle to be noticed. I walked herthrough high, white, hollow space to my office at the back.
Tall and narrow-hipped and busty, she put a lot of roll-and-sway into herwalk. If her breasts weren’t real, their free movement was an ad for a greatscalpel artist. Her face was oval and smooth, blessed by wide-set aquamarineeyes that could feign spontaneous fascination without much effort, balancedperfectly on a long, smooth stalk of a neck.
Faint bruising along the sides of the neck were masked by body makeup. Therest of her skin was bronze velvet stretched across fine bones. Tanning bed orone of those spray jobs that last for a week. Tiny, mocha freckles sprinkledacross her nose hinted at her natural complexion. Wide lips were enlarged bygloss. A mass of honey-colored hair trailed past her shoulder blades. Somestylist had taken a long time to texturize the ’do and make it look careless.Half a dozen shades of blond aped nature.
Her black, stovepipe jeans hung nearly low enough to require a pubic wax.Her hip bones were smooth little knobs calling out for a tango partner. A blackjersey, cap-sleeved T-shirt rhinestone Porn Star ended an inch above a wrysmile of navel. The same flawless golden dermis sheathed a drum-tight abdomen.Her nails were long and French-tipped, her false lashes perfect. Plucked browsadded to the illusion of permanent surprise.
Lots of time and money spent to augment lucky chromosomes. She’d convincedthe court system she was poor. Turned out she was, the debit card finished, twohundred bucks left in her checking account.
“I got my landlord to extend me a month,” she said, “but unless I clear thisup soon and get another job, I’m going to get evicted.”
Tears welled in the blue-green eyes. Clouds of hair tossed and fluffed andresettled. Despite her long legs, she’d managed to curl up in the big leatherpatient’s chair and look small.
“What does clearing it up mean to you?” I said.
“Pardon?”
“Clearing it up.”
“You know,” she said. “I need to get rid of…this, this mess.”
I nodded and she cocked her head like a puppy. “Lauritz said you were thebest.”
First-name basis with her lawyer. I wondered if Montez had been motivated bymore than professional responsibility.
Stop, suspicious fellow. Focus on the patient.
This patient was leaning forward and smiling shyly, loose breasts cuppingblack jersey. I said, “What did Mr. Montez tell you about this evaluation?”
“That I should open myself up emotionally.” She poked at a corner of oneeye. Dropped her hand and ran her finger along a black-denim knee.
“Open yourself up how?”
“You know, not hold back from you, just basically be myself. I’m…”
I waited.
She said, “I’m glad it’s you. You seem kind.” She curled one leg under theother.
I said, “Tell me how it happened, Michaela.”
“How what happened?”
“The phony abduction.”
She flinched. “You don’t want to know about my childhood or anything?”
“We may get into that later, but it’s best to start with the hoax itself.I’d like to hear what happened in your words.”
“My words. Boy.” Half smile. “No foreplay, huh?”
I smiled back. She unfolded her legs and a pair of high-heeled blackSkechers alit on the carpet. She flexed one foot. Looked around the office. “Iknow I did wrong but I’m a good girl, Doctor. Ideally am.”
She crossed her arms over the Porn Star logo. “Where to start…I have to tellyou, I feel so exposed.”
I pictured her rushing onto the road, naked, nearly causing an old man todrive his truck off a cliff. “I know it’s tough to think about what you did,Michaela, but it could be really helpful to get used to talking about it.”
“So you can understand me?”
“That,” I said, “but also at some point you might be required to allocate.”
“What’s that?”
“To tell the judge what you did.”
“Confession,” she said. “It’s a fancy word for confession?”
“I guess it is.”
“All these words they use.” She laughed softly. “At least I’m learningstuff.”
“Probably not the way you wanted to.”
“That’s for sure…lawyers, cops. I don’t even remember who I told what.”
“It’s pretty confusing,” I said.
“Totally, Doctor. I have a thing for that.”
“For what?”
“Confusion. Back in Phoenix—inhigh school—some people used to think I was an airhead. The brainiacs, youknow? Truth is, I got confused a lot. Still do. Maybe it’s because I fell on myhead when I was a little kid. Fell off a swing and passed out. After that Inever really did too good in school.”
“Sounds like a bad fall.”
“I don’t remember much about it, Doctor, but they told me I was unconsciousfor half a day.”
“How old were you?”
“Maybe three. Four. I was swinging high, used to love to swing. Must’ve letgo or something and went flying. I hit my head other times, too. I was alwaysfalling, tripping over myself. My legs grew so fast, when I was fifteen I wentfrom five feet to five eight in six months.”
“You’re accident-prone.”
“My mom used to say I was an accident waiting to happen. I’d get her to buyme good jeans, and then I’d rip the knees and she’d get upset and promise neverto buy me anything anymore.”
She touched her left temple. Caught some hair between her fingers andtwisted. Pouted. That reminded me of someone. I watched her fidget and itfinally came to me: young Brigitte Bardot.
Would she know who that was?
She said, “My head’s been spinning. Since the mess. It’s like someone else’sscreenplay and I’m drifting through the scenes.”
“The legal system can be overwhelming.”
“I never thought I’d bein the system! I mean, I don’t even watch crime stuffon TV. My mom reads mysteries but I hate them.”
“What do you read?”
She’d turned aside, didn’t answer. I repeated the question.
“Oh, sorry, I spaced out. What do I read…Us magazine. People, Elle, youknow.”
“How about we talk about what happened?”
“Sure, sure…it was just supposed to be…maybe Dylan and I took it too far butmy acting teacher, her big thing is that the whole point of the training is tolose yourself and enter the scene, you really need to abandon the self, youknow, the ego. Just give yourself up to the scene and flow.”
“That’s what you and Dylan were doing,” I said.
“I guess I started outthinking we were doing that and I guess…I really don’tknow what happened. It’s so crazy, how did I get into this craziness ?”
She slammed a fist into an open hand, shuddered, threw up her arms. Begancrying softly. A vein throbbed in her neck, pumping through cover-up,accentuating a bruise.
I handed her a tissue. Her fingers lingered on my knuckles. She sniffled.“Thanks.”
I sat back down. “So you thought you were doing what Nora Dowd taught you.”
“You know Nora?”
“I’ve read the court documents.”
“Nora’s in the documents?”
“She’s mentioned. So you’re saying the false abduction was related to yourtraining.”
“You keep calling it false,” she said.
“What would you like me to call it?”
“I don’t know…something else. The exercise. How about that? That’s reallywhat it started out as.”
“An acting exercise.”
“Uh-huh.” She crossed her legs. “Nora never came out and told us to do an exercisebut we thought—she was always pushing us to get into the core of our feelings.Dylan and I figured we’d…” She bit her lip. “It was never supposed to go thatfar.”
She touched her temple again. “I must’ve been whack. Dylan and I were justtrying to be artistically authentic. Like when I tied him up and wrapped therope around myself, I held it around my neck for a while to make sure it wouldleave marks.” She frowned, touched a bruise.
“I see it.”
“I knew it wouldn’t take long. To make a bruise. I bruise real easily. Maybethat’s why I don’t do pain very well.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m a crybaby about pain so I stay away from it.” She touched a spot wherethe scoop neck of the T-shirt met skin. “Dylan feels nothing, I mean, he’s likestone. When I tied him up, he kept saying tighter, he wanted to feel it.”
“Pain?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Not his neck at first, just his legs and arms. Buteven that hurts when you go tight enough, right? But he kept telling metighter, tighter. Finally I screamed at him, I’m doing it as tight as I can.”She gazed up at the ceiling. “He just laid there. Then he smiled and said maybeyou should do my neck the same way.”
“Dylan has a death wish?”
“Dylan’s a freak…it was freaky up there, dark, cold, this emptiness in theair. You could hear things crawling around.” She hugged herself. “I said thisis too weird, maybe it wasn’t a good idea.”
“What did Dylan say?”
“He just laid there with his head to the side.” She closed her eyes anddemonstrated. Let her mouth grow slack and showed a half inch of pointed, pinktongue. “Pretending to be dead, you know? I said, ‘Cut it out, that’s gross,’but he refused to talk or move and finally it got to me. I rolled over to himand touched his head and he just flopped, you know?”
“Method acting,” I said.
Puzzled stare.
“It’s when you live a role completely, Michaela.”
Her eyes were somewhere else. “Whatever…”
“How soon into the exercise did you tie him up?”
“Second night, it was all the second night. He was okay before that, then hestarted punking me. I was letting him because I was scared. The whole thing…Iwas so, so stupid.”
She folded wings of golden hair forward, masking her face. I thought of ashow spaniel in the ring. Handlers manipulating the ears over the nose to offerthe judge a choice view of the skull.
“Dylan scared you.”
“He didn’t move for along time,” she said.
“Were you worried you’d tied him too tight?”
She released the hair but kept her gaze low. “Honestly, I can’t tell you,even now what his motivation was. Maybe he really was unconscious, maybe he waspunking me a hundred percent. He’s…it was really his idea, Doctor. I promise.”
“Dylan thought the whole thing up?”
“Everything. Like getting rope and where to go.”
“How’d he pick Latigo Canyon?”
“He said he hiked there, he likes to hike by himself, it helps him get incharacter.” The tongue tip glided across her lower lip, left behind asnail-trail of moisture.
“He also says one day he’s going to have a place there.”
“Latigo Canyon?”
“Malibu, buton the beach, like the Colony. He’s crazy intense.”
“About his career?”
“There are some people who put everything into a scene, you know? But laterthey know when to stop? Dylan can be cool when he’s just being himself, buthe’s got these ambitions. Cover of People, take the place of Johnny Depp.”
“What are your ambitions, Michaela?”
“Me? I just want to work. TV, big screen, episodic, commercials, whatever.”
“Dylan wouldn’t be happy with that.”
“Dylan wants to be number one on the Sexiest Man List.”
“Have you talked to him since the exercise?”
“No.”
“Whose decision was that?”
“Lauritz told me to stay away.”
“Were you and Dylan pretty close before?”
“I guess. Dylan said we had natural chemistry. That’s probably why Igot…swept along. The whole thing was his idea but he freaked me out up there.I’m talking to him and shaking him and he looks really…you know.”
“Dead.”
“Not that I’ve ever seen anyone really dead but when I was young I liked towatch splatter flicks. Not now, though. I get grossed out easily.”
“What’d you do when you thought Dylan looked dead?”
“I went crazy and started untying the neck rope, and he still wasn’t movingand he held his mouth open and was looking really…” She shook her head. “Theatmosphere up there, I was getting freaked out. I started slapping his face andyelling at him to stop it. His head just kept flopping back and forth. Like oneof those loosening exercises Nora has us do before a big scene.”
“Scary,” I said.
“Scary-terrifying. I’m dyslexic, not intense dyslexic, like illiterate orillegible, I can read okay. But it takes me a long time to memorize words. Ican’t sound anything out. I mean, I can memorize my lines but I really workhard.”
“Being dyslexic made it scarier to see Dylan like that?”
“Because my head felt all scrambled up and I couldn’t think straight. and then being scared blurred it. Like my thoughts weren’t making sense—like beingin another language, you know?”
“Disoriented.”
“I mean, look what I did,” she said. “Untied myself and climbed up that hilland ran out to the road without even putting my clothes on. I had to bedisoriented. If I was thinking normal, would I do that? Then, after that oldguy, the one on the road who…” Her frown made it as far as the left side of hermouth before retracting.
“The old man who…”
“I was going to say the old guy saved me but I wasn’t in real danger. Still,Was pretty terrified. Because I still didn’t know if Dylan was okay. By thetime the old guy called the rescue squad and they got there, Dylan was out ofthe ropes and standing there. When no one was looking, he gave a little smile.Like ha-ha, good joke.”
“You feel Dylan manipulated you.”
“That’s the saddest thing. Losing trust. The whole thing was supposed to beabout trust. Nora’s always teaching us about the artist’s life as constantdanger. You’re always working without a net. Dylan was my partner and I trustedhim. That’s why I went along with it in the first place.”
“Did it take him a while to talk you into it?”
She frowned. “He made it like an adventure. Buying all that stuff. He mademe feel like a kid having fun.”
“Planning was fun,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“Buying the rope and the food.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Careful plan.”
Her shoulders tightened. “What do you mean?”
“You guys paid cash and used several different stores in differentneighborhoods.”
“That was all Dylan,” she said.
“Did he explain why he’d planned it that way?”
“We really didn’t talk about it. It was like…we did so many exercises before,this was just another one. I felt I had to use my right side. Of my brain. Norataught us to concentrate on using the right side of the brain, just kind ofslip into right-brain stuff.”
“The creative side,” I said.
“Exactly. Don’t think too much, just throw yourself in.”
“Nora keeps coming up.”
Silence.
“How do you think she feels about what happened, Michaela?”
“I know how she feels. She’s pissed. After the police took me in, I calledher. She said getting caught was amateurish and stupid, don’t come back. Thenshe hung up.”
“Getting caught,” I said. “She wasn’t angry at the scheme itself?”
“That’s what she told me. It was stupid to get caught.” Her eyes moistened.
“Hearing that from her must’ve been tough,” I said.
“She’s in a power role vis-à-vis me.”
“You try talking to her again?”
“She won’t return my calls. So now I can’t go to the PlayHouse. Not that itmatters. I guess.”
“Time to move on?”
Tears ran down her face. “I can’t afford to study, ’cause I’m broke. Gonnahave to put my name in with one of those agencies. Be a personal assistant or ananny. Or flip burgers or something.”
“Those are your only choices?”
“Who’s gonna hire me for a good job when I need to go out on auditions? Andalso untilthis is over.”
I handed her another tissue.
“I sure wasn’t out to hurt anyone, believe me, Doctor. I know I should’vethought more and felt less, but Dylan…” She drew up her legs again. Negligiblebody fat allowed her to fold like paper. With that lack of insulation, two nightsup in the hills must’ve chilled her. Even if she was lying about her fear, theexperience hadn’t been pleasant: The final police report had cited fresh humanexcrement under a nearby tree, leaves and candy wrappers used for toilet paper.
“Now,” she said, “everyone will think I’m a dumb blonde.”
“Some people say there’s no such thing as bad publicity.”
“They do?” she said. “You think so?”
“I think people can turn themselves around.”
She fixed her eyes on mine. “I was stupid and I’m so, so sorry.”
I said, “Whatever you guys intended, it ended up being a rough couple ofnights.”
“What do you mean?”
“Being out there in the cold. No bathroom.”
“That was gross, ” she said. “It was freezing and I felt likecreepy-crawlies were all over me, just eating me up. Afterward my arms and legsand my neck hurt. Because I tied myself too tight.” She grimaced. “I wanted tobe authentic. To show Dylan.”
“Show him what?”
“That I was a serious actor.”
“Were you out to please anyone else, Michaela?”
“What do you mean?”
“You had to figure the story would get exposure. Did you consider how otherpeople would react?”
“Like who?”
“Let’s start with Nora.”
“I honestly felt she’d respect us. For having integrity. Instead she’spissed.”
“What about your mother?”
She waved that off.
“You didn’t think about your mother?”
“I don’t talk to her. She’s not in my life.”
“Does she know about what happened?”
“She doesn’t read the papers but I guess if it’s in the Phoenix Sun and somebody shows it to her.”
“You haven’t called her?”
“She can’t do anything to help me.” She mumbled.
“Why’s that, Michaela?”
“She’s sick. Lung disease. My whole childhood she was sick with something.Even when I fell on my head it was a neighbor took me to the doctor.”
“Mom wasn’t there for you.”
She glanced to the side. “When she was stoned she’d hit me.”
“Mom was into drugs.”
“Mostly weed, sometimes she’d take pills for her moods. Mostly, she liked tosmoke. Weed and tobacco and Courvoisier. Her lungs are seriously burned away.She breathes with a tank.”
“Tough childhood.”
She mumbled again.
I said, “I missed that.”
“My childhood. I don’t like talking about it but I’m being totally honestwith you. No illusions, no emotional curtain, you know? It’s like a mantra. Ikept telling myself, ‘honesty honesty honesty.’ Lauritz told me to keep thathere, right in front.” A tapered finger touched a smooth, bronze brow.
“What did you figure would happen when the story got out?”
Silence.
“Michaela?”
“Maybe TV.”
“Getting on TV?”
“Reality TV. Like a mixture of Punk’d and Survivor and Fear Factor but withno one knowing what’s real and what isn’t. It’s not like we were trying to bemean. We were just trying to get a breakthrough.”
“What kind of breakthrough?”
“Mentally.”
“What about as a career move?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you think it might get you a part on a reality show?”
“Dylan thought it might,” she said.
“You didn’t?”
“I didn’t think, period…maybe down deep—unconsciously—I thought it mighthelp get through the wall.”
“What wall is that?”
“The success wall. You go on auditions and they look at you like you’re notthere, and even when they say they might call they don’t. You’re just astalented as the girl who gets called, there’s no reason anything happens. Sowhy not? Get yourself noticed, do something special or weird or terrific. Makeyourself special for being special.”
She got up, circled the office. Kicked one shoe with the other and nearlylost balance. Maybe she’d been telling the truth about being clumsy.
“It’s a suck life,” she said.
“Being an actor.”
“Being any kind of artist. Everyone loves artists but they also hate them!”
Grabbing her hair with both hands, she yanked, stretching her beautiful faceinto something reptilian.
“Do you have any idea how hard it is?” she said through elongated lips.
“What?”
She released the hair. Looked down on me as if I was thick.
“To. Get. Anyone. To. Pay. Attention! ”