My father points to his watch and signals that it is time to go. In all these years, he has never missed a day at the studio. Regardless of catastrophe—earthquakes, divorce, even death—he maintains a perfect attendance record. Some people cope by drinking, my father copes by coping. He walks to the wicker loveseat, picks up his folded jacket, and looks back at me. I realize that he is not wearing his glasses; diffusing this picture of his comatose, only child through a filter of near legally blind vision. A copy of the Hollywood Reporter sticks out of his jacket pocket as it has since the beginning of time.

SLOW DISSOLVE TO:

MALIBU COLONY HOME

DAY

APRIL 1979

When you lose someone early on, your mind bottles the memories and stores them away, airtight. I have recollections of my parents going back to my first years of life. It’s possible these are imprints from stories told to me, though who would have done the telling, I don’t know. In Sidney Goldstein’s house, one didn’t speak of the not-so-dearly departed.

My mother was rarely mentioned. Like the word “cancer,” her name was mouthed rather than spoken aloud. She lived in Hawaii and kept in touch through long, drunken, hysterical messages left on our answering machine. There were no pictures to remind us of her; Daddy had removed them. Most of the furniture she’d bought had been replaced. In my room, under my new four-poster bed, I kept her old jewelry box. Its contents—abandoned keepsakes—were my only links to our past: a heart locket containing a picture of me at six, a charm bracelet, and (my prized possession) a necklace with violet gemstones. It was part of a set that included dangling, clip-on earrings. While I treasured those pieces, it is important to note that in the two years since she’d been gone, I wasn’t exactly pining for her. Life was much calmer and about a million decibels quieter with her gone. Daddy and Anna and I had dinner together at the kitchen table almost every evening. Anna chuckled at my father’s jokes. We were like a television sitcom family.

Still, there were times—like on Mother’s Day when every single one of my friends was busy making cards or bringing breakfast trays to their moms—that I sort of missed her. Well, maybe I didn’t exactly miss her, but I missed having a mom. And though I was all too aware of my parent’s fights, I wondered what specifically led up to her leaving. Maybe she’d had good reason. Maybe there were events from her past I didn’t know about. On Anna’s soap opera, a teenage girl found out her mother was actually her big sister! That probably didn’t apply in my case, but still, my mother’s life was mostly a mystery.