again, but it was still there between them like a small electric force field. Nonetheless, he had wanted her to stay in L.A. so that they could be together when he wasn’t working. She had planned to visit her parents for four days but left on the morning of the third day because she and her mother had argued so often, and her sister had recently been dumped by a guy she had gone to high school with, who, a few minutes before breaking up with her, had asked for Elise’s e-mail address, something that it seemed Mrs. Connor blamed Elise for more than Belle’s ex.
Coming home from Texas, she had felt depressed and sad and resentful of the unfair treatment her mother and sister had inflicted on her. Renn told her that it would pass, and although he sounded sympathetic and told her to come straight from the airport to his place, she said that she would see him in the morning if he could spare an hour or two because she knew that he worked best at night and she didn’t want to distract him. In fact, she wanted to go home and mope. She did not feel like talking to anyone, especially after having to be nice to the few dozen strangers who had stopped her at both airports to ask for her autograph. She could only hold a smile for so long before it started to feel like her face would freeze into a permanent grimace.
At home, she put her suitcase in the guest bedroom closest to the master bedroom. She had left two other larger suitcases in there already, neither of them unpacked. Her days were so busy, or else she felt too tired to put away the clothes she had taken to New Orleans, despite being home for more than a month now. Her next project, You Knew Me When, would start in late February, and most of it would be filmed in southern California, with one two-week shoot in Argentina scheduled for early April, but she didn’t know when she would bother to unpack the New Orleans suitcases, and now she had the Dallas one too. It seemed easier to buy new suitcases, which could be purchased online in about three minutes, and she also grew tired of her clothes so quickly these days that she preferred to shop for new ones rather than unpack the old ones and keep wearing them. She had told no one that she was doing this; she knew it was shameful, the opposite of her parents’ admirable thriftiness. Her thought was that eventually she would donate her old clothes to charity or give some of them to Belle if she lost enough weight and wanted to take them.
She could have had her housekeeper unpack the suitcases for her; Marita had offered several times, but Elise wasn’t yet used to the idea of someone else organizing and maintaining her wardrobe. Gwynn, her personal assistant, who was ten years older, very efficient, and not particularly talkative, which was fine with Elise, could have been asked to unpack the suitcases too, but she had not told Gwynn about them, fearing her disapproval, or worse, the confused, vaguely scornful look that would pass across her face while Elise tried to explain herself.
8.
A week before Elise left for Argentina, two things happened: Belle tried to kill herself—halfheartedly, as it turned out, but it nonetheless deeply frightened Elise and her parents. The second thing was that Will wrote to her; it was the first time she had heard from him since he’d left New Orleans.
Elise was only given a day and a half off from You Knew Me When to fly home to Dallas to visit her sister in the hospital, and although she tried to get another day off, the producers said, No way in hell. Her sister looked pale and puffy and embarrassed when Elise arrived in her hospital room, their parents sitting nearby, faces drawn and very weary.
Elise didn’t know what to say, other than “Why would you do this to yourself? To our parents? What the fuck were you thinking?” She kept her mouth closed.
Belle cried when Elise leaned down to the bed to hug her, and Elise started crying too. “I’m sorry,” Belle said weakly into her sister’s hair.
Elise could feel Belle’s tears on her neck and wondered for a witless second if she was responsible for Belle’s misery. If she hadn’t gone to that club and met