Ghosted: A Novel

Dear Eddie,

In the absence of a request to stop writing, I’m going to continue.

It had been agreed that I would stay in LA for another few months, even though this would mean missing out on my final A-level year. I didn’t care: I couldn’t go back.

I had a total of two friends, and I lived in the “guest suite” of a house in Beverly Hills that had a pool and a full-time housekeeper. The only thing that reminded me even vaguely of home was the flank of plane trees on either side of South Bedford Drive. Only they weren’t really like home, because it had been a brutal summer and they were charred like crispy bacon by the time September was under way.

Tommy’s mum arranged for me to clean some of her friends’ houses so I’d have a little cash: it was my only option, without a visa. I cleaned for the Steins, the Tysons, and the Garwins, and on Wednesday afternoons I did a weekly grocery shop for Mrs. Garcia, who used to beg me to become her kids’ au pair. It bothered her a great deal that I said no. She couldn’t fathom how I could get on so well with her kids and yet refuse to look after them, and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her why.

I thought I’d reached my full height but started growing again, upward and outward. I had boobs and a waist and a bottom. I was turning into the shape I am now, I guess, and I was working out what sort of a woman I wanted to be. Strong, I’d decided. Strong, driven, and successful. I’d spent years being a wimp, a wallflower, a limp nobody.

One day in November Mrs. Garcia’s daughter, Casey, broke her arm at preschool. The au pair Mrs. Garcia had eventually hired stayed with Casey’s brother and I was asked to accompany the little girl to the hospital in a taxi. Mrs. Garcia was racing back from a conference in Orange County. She insisted I take her daughter to CHLA, even though it was miles away—she knew people there, she said; she wanted Casey to see a familiar face while she waited for her mom.

Poor Casey. She was so frightened by the pain; by the time we’d driven across town from Beverly Hills her teeth were chattering and she wouldn’t talk to the doctors. I couldn’t stand it.

As soon as Mrs. Garcia arrived, I left the hospital and went to find a joke shop someone had mentioned, near the intersection of Vermont and Hollywood. I wanted to find something that would make Casey laugh. Before I got there, though, I was assaulted by a great explosion of kids coming out of a Mexican restaurant right on the corner. They had balloons and face paint and they looked to be a million miles from where Casey was right now.

Shortly after they were chased back inside by a harassed-looking mother, a clown came out of the restaurant and slumped against the wall. He looked shattered. He got out a packet of fags and took a Mexican beer wrapped in a paper bag out of one of his pockets. I laughed as he opened it up and took a long, grateful drink. He was a very funny sort of a clown, no face paint or wig, just a boy with a red nose and odd clothes. And an illegal beer.

“This isn’t what it looks like,” he said, when he saw me. “I’m not really drinking and smoking outside a kids’ party.” I told him not to worry and asked for directions to the joke shop. He pointed down Hollywood at a store covered in graffiti and murals. “Can I come with you?” the clown asked. “I’m traumatized. I trained with Philippe Gaulier in France. I’m meant to be a theater practitioner, not a kids’ entertainer.”

I asked what the difference was. Turned out it was quite considerable.

“I tell you what,” I said to him, pausing on the steps of the joke shop. “If I promise not to tell on you for drinking and smoking outside a kids’ party, will you do me a favor? A fairly big favor?”

So this poor bloke, who probably smelled of cigarettes and alcohol, followed me into the Children’s Hospital and paid Casey a visit.

As we approached Casey’s ER cubicle, I felt his energy change. “From this moment on I will be Franc Fromage. Don’t use my regular name,” he instructed, even though I didn’t know what his “regular name” was.

Franc Fromage arrived at Casey’s bedside and produced a ukulele. He sang a song to her arm, about it being broken, and even though Casey was still frightened and upset, she couldn’t help but laugh. And then he asked her to help him make up the next verse, and she was concentrating so hard on that that she forgot where she was and how frightened she was. Soon after, she agreed to let the doctors set her arm.

Monsieur Fromage told me he’d enjoyed the visit very much. He got very overexcited and started using all sorts of theatrical and psychological terms I didn’t understand. I was rescued by a nurse asking if Franc Fromage would come back, please, because all the other kids wanted to meet the ukulele man with the red nose.

When we finally left, he gave me his phone number and—visibly terrified—told me I owed him a drink. “My name is Reuben,” he said gravely. “Reuben Mackey.”

So I called him and we went for a drink. Reuben said he’d been reading about hospital clowning since he’d met me and apparently it was a real thing with a method and studies. Some guy in New York had set up the first charity in the eighties. I want to train with him, he said. Use my skills to actually help people, not just make them laugh.

Nothing happened that night. I think we were both too shy. Besides, Tommy and Jo were watching us from a table across the street “in case he turns out to be one of them clowns that murders people,” as Jo put it.

Then Mrs. Garcia asked if I could get Franc Fromage to come to the hospital again because Casey was having her plaster cast removed. He said okay, but only if I bought him another drink.

He not only helped Casey get her plaster off but he spent hours with the other kids in orthopedics, too. He only stopped when he realized his hands were trembling with hunger. “Please come back!” one of the nurses implored.

The problem was, he couldn’t afford to work for nothing. He was living in a tiny shared apartment in Koreatown, he told me, couldn’t afford to earn a cent less.

That’s when I said, “How about I raise the money for you to do one day per month?” I told him I worked for all these wealthy people and how news of his time in the hospital had spread fast.

And that’s how it began. My relationship with a clown and the birth of our company. He went to New York to train with psychotherapists, child psychologists, and theater practitioners. Then he came back and we got going. He visited the sick children and I stayed in the background raising money and organizing, which suited me perfectly. I wanted to be involved—I wanted it more than he knew—I just didn’t want to be on the front line.

I was good at it. Reuben was good at it. People saw and heard about what we did and they wanted us to visit their sick kids. We hired three more people; Reuben trained them. Before long we founded our first little training academy. We got married, rented a flat in Los Feliz, near the Children’s Hospital. Years later the hipsters moved in and Reuben was in his element.

As for me, I had a purpose, and a direction, and I had no time to think about the life I’d left. I had a man who needed me to be strong when he was weak, and vice versa. Our love was based on reciprocal need and strength, and it worked perfectly.

For a long time that kind of love was all I thought I needed. When I promised to love and honor him forever, I meant it. But, of course, I changed. As the years passed, I no longer needed him, and so our balance was fatally disrupted. We cared so much about each other, Eddie, but without that balance of need, the scales couldn’t settle. My inability to give him a baby was the final straw. After the car accident I couldn’t stand being near kids; couldn’t bear the thought of a child suffering. The very idea of bringing a child into the world—a defenseless baby like my little sister had once been—created a storm of blind panic.

So I stuck to helping sick children from behind the scenes. It was bearable, and it was safe. It was the best I could manage, but it just wasn’t enough for Reuben. He wanted to hold his own baby in his arms, he told me. He couldn’t imagine a future in which that wasn’t possible.

By the time he had the courage to end things, I realized I had no idea what love should feel like. But when I met you, I finally knew what it should be. Our few days together weren’t a fling for me, and I don’t believe they were for you, either.

Please write to me.

Sarah