Glass Onion

Of course I can walk home alone,” Helen said. “I’m almost thirteen.” It was July, 1970, in southern California, and she was standing next to the driver’s window of her family’s Country Squire, breathing in the smell of her mother’s cigarette, which she loved. Her mother only smoked in a crisis, like now: in the passenger seat sat Helen’s younger sister, Maggie, the daredevil, who’d split her scalp open on the diving board of the country club pool. The white towel Maggie held pressed to her head was pink with blood, and she was beaming with the excitement and attention and the prospect of ice cream for dinner.

Scott, the lifeguard, had carried her out to the car. “Not to worry, Mrs. Wyatt,” he’d said. “Head wounds always bleed like crazy.”

“Don’t I know it.” Helen’s mother had sighed and pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head. She was so often compared to Natalie Wood that the movie star’s drowning years later would seem like the death of a distant relative.

Scott tucked a beach towel around Maggie but didn’t buckle the seatbelt—back then, nobody did.

“You’re too kind,” Helen’s mother said, meaning that he should get his naked torso out of the car already so she could drive her child to the emergency room.

Then she turned to Helen, who was, her mother often said, a perfect nightmare in the ER—though she’d never been a patient—fretting about germs on the orange plastic chairs and the soft, thumbed magazines, flinching whenever the automatic doors slid open in dread of beholding severed limbs, bereaved people screaming. “Do you remember where the hide-a-key is?” her mother asked.

Helen glanced at Scott—who didn’t look like a criminal, but you never knew—and whispered into her mother’s ear.

“Good girl. Don’t talk to anyone.”

God, no. It was the summer of the Manson trial, and the Wyatts lived not twenty miles from where Sharon Tate and her dinner guests had been murdered. Helen and her friend Amy traded tips on bedside self-defense: Right Guard or Aqua Net sprayed into the intruder’s eyes, then a quick, hard stab to the windpipe. Their parents were always asking where the hell the scissors had got to.

Maggie practiced her future Rose Queen wave out the window as the car eased onto Orange Grove Boulevard.

Helen darted away across the country club lawn, in case her mother decided on second thought that she might as well stay at camp until the end of the day and get a ride home from another parent. Being happy about Maggie’s accident didn’t mean she was a psycho, like the Manson girls. She loved her sister—mostly—but she also hated tennis camp. Her parents had insisted that she go, though Helen had known it would be ghastly. She’d pronounced it in the British way as her grandmother did, which made her mother laugh. But then she said, “I’d have given my eye teeth for such an opportunity when I was your age.”

“Careful,” Helen’s father said, in a warning tone. Helen’s mother’s parents had been poor and now they were dead, but her father didn’t like her mother reliving the details of being underprivileged, like being willing to barter her teeth.

“Well, I can’t have her sitting around all summer complaining that she’s bored.”

“I won’t—I’ll read.”

Helen’s favorite books were historical novels praised as “sweeping” on the jackets. But the truth was that she was often achingly bored—stalking from room to room, yanking open drawers and cabinets, skimming for the sexy parts in the books on the living room shelves: The Naked Communist, None Dare Call It Conspiracy. Disappointed, she’d fling them down and sprawl on the carpet, imagining a life in which she’d wear old-fashioned clothes and make clever retorts as she flounced away.

Clever retorts and flouncing away were not put up with...