“I thought the Hyatt took care of that roof-deer problem,” my dad says under his breath, and my mom swats him playfully before continuing her skit.
“Who could it be?”
“Ho ho ho!” bellows Ty, striding out of the bedroom.
Wearing a Santa costume that is clearly meant to be worn by an adult male stripper.
Felix, who had made the mistake of taking a sip of Dr. Pepper right before Ty emerged, makes a sound like he’s about to choke, and I have to fight to keep from bursting out laughing.
“I did try to dissuade him,” my mom whispers. “But you know Ty.”
Ty must hear her, but nothing is going to ruin his enthusiasm for this moment, just like nothing derails him once he gets an idea in his head. Ty grins from ear to ear. “Ho ho ho!” He says again, doing a little jig in his red and white fur-trimmed Santa shorts—which are fairly short even on him, though they are clearly too big at the waist—and huge matching jacket. He’s got a white t-shirt of his own under the jacket, which makes sense because I’m guessing this get-up didn’t come with a shirt.
“Wow,” Felix manages. “It’s Santa Claus! Right here!”
“And wearing such cool Santa shorts, too,” I say, and Felix nods along, his face as red as I’m sure mine is from the laughter we’re keeping in.
“They are cool,” Ty says, all serious now. “Look! They have Velcro all up the sides!”
And with that, both Felix and I can’t handle it anymore, and we burst out laughing, my mom joining in. Even my dad grins, though he’s shaking his head.
Ty doesn’t seem bothered. He just laughs right along with us.
“I’ve got a present for you,” he says, when the giggles have all trailed off a bit. “I didn’t have time to wrap it, though.” He goes to the desk and pulls a piece of paper out of the drawer, and then hands it to us.
It’s a picture, drawn and colored in, of the three of us—Felix and me, with Ty in the middle, holding hands. Labeled, too, in case we couldn’t tell—Dad, Mom, Ty.
My heart swells happily, and I feel tears prick at the corner of my eyes.
“It’s our family,” Ty says.
Felix squeezes my hand again. “Yeah, it is,” he says, and he sounds a little choked-up again, and not with Dr. Pepper. “This is incredible, Ty. Thanks.” He pulls Ty into a hug, and then me as well, and there’s nowhere in the world I’d rather be than here, with my guys, with the two people I love more than all the world.
“I left some space,” Ty says, after he’s wriggled free of the family hug. “For a baby brother.”
“Of course you did,” Felix says, and I laugh, and Felix grins at me.
The rest of the day we spend together, just the three of us—and our security tail. We get deep dish pizza at Pizzeria Uno, and then check out Lake Michigan from Navy Pier. We ride the huge Ferris wheel and sing Christmas carols at the top of our lungs, though we did manage to convince Ty that the Santa suit might be a bit chilly for wearing outdoors in October.
People look at us like we’re crazy, and I think maybe we get recognized, because a younger couple is taking pics of us with their phones, but I don’t care.
We’re a family, the three of us, and despite the tension and fears of earlier—both today, and even before—Felix and I hold hands and we laugh and he looks at me in that way he does that makes me feel all light inside.
Later, after we’ve dropped Ty off to bed in my parent’s room—and Felix has very pointedly ignored my teasing suggestion that he borrow Ty’s Santa suit for the evening—and we’ve curled up in our bed and made jokes about our son starring in A Magic Mike Christmas, we finish what got interrupted earlier.
We don’t talk about before, but I can feel the presence of all those unspoken words. Not as heavy, but still there, still filling the spaces between us.
I lie there after Felix has dozed off, curled up tightly in his arms. It’s those words, the ones I can’t say about my past and the ones I’m afraid to say about his, that have been causing the tension. I know it. And I’m worried about getting it all wrong, about failing him and making his daily struggles even more difficult.
But I can do better, for him. I can try harder to hear all the things he might need to say, even the ones that terrify me.
I fall asleep to the sound of my husband’s heartbeat, warm and safe, resolving tomorrow to try.
Six
Felix
I’ve been dreading the New York show since the beginning of the tour, but never more so than when I wake up in Chicago and get on the damn plane bound for La Guardia. It’s got to be psychological, but my body knows what’s coming. I lost my mind when I went to Juilliard, and while I know the city isn’t to blame, I still feel like I’m going to visit an old drug buddy. I spend the whole flight fiddling with the ends of my sleeves, trying not to look like a nervous junkie who desperately wants to shoot up right there on the plane.
I don’t have anything. Of course I don’t have anything; I’m on a damn plane. And I don’t have any cash either. I try not to scope out the other passengers to see who might have slipped a gram of something past security, but the guy at the back of first class has corporate user written all over him, from the expensive martini in his hand to the nervous way he’s jiggling his knee up and down, up and down.
Like I am. Jenna looks over at me across Ty, who she’s just been telling that yes, he’s allowed to recline his seat, but not over and over again, because it will annoy the people behind him, that’s why. His grandparents are sitting in front of us, ignoring us over the seat backs. I try to relax my shoulders, but she looks down at my hands where my nails have picked a thread loose in the hem of my sleeve, and her mouth sets in a line.
She sees. Of course she sees. And I want to talk to her about it, but not with Ty sitting right here. I’m not sure she would anyway, after our conversation yesterday. When she blames herself for what happened to her—for the frat boys who used her even though she was underage, the men at parties who did who knows what with her while she was unconscious, and Grant, who called her vile things and convinced her to agree to sex acts she thought might kill her . . .
I want these men to burn in hell for what they did to her. After the things I’ve done, I should probably have empathy for them, but I don’t, and it’s all I can do to keep from telling Jenna exactly how I see it. God, the look on her face when I almost called it what it was—
I can’t. Not yet. The words feel too much like violence until she’s ready to hear them.
Jenna turns away from me and engages Ty in a game of checkers on one of those little magnet travel checker boards his grandfather bought him at an airport. I can’t remember which one, we’ve been to so many.
I close my eyes, lean back my seat—just once—and try not to notice how she didn’t suggest that I play the game with Ty. She’s been conveniently not going crazy by capitalizing on Ty’s exuberance at having a father to bring along on his many adventures. I don’t think the kid has noticed that she’s pawning him off on me for extra sleep, but I don’t mind, either. He and I have a lot of lost time to make up for.
I don’t like her thinking I’m the one who needs the extra sleep.
I wish we never had to land at La Guardia, but of course we do. We’re playing at Barclays Center out in Brooklyn, which I’d be grateful for if I hadn’t known half a dozen addicts there who made a living selling dope out of their very tiny apartments. It’s been almost three years, so it’s probable none of them live in the same place anymore, and half of them might kill me on sight because I sold them out to the cops to get out of being prosecuted for possession during my last week in New York.
A lot of people in this city want to kick my ass, and all I can think about is mapping my way to their apartments in my mind, thinking of all the places I could score some H.
Ty’s grandparents take him off t
o one museum or another, so when Jenna and I arrive at the hotel, we collapse in our room. My brain is still working out where I can find drugs, and I just want to turn it off already.
Jenna checks her phone. “We have like five hours before the show,” she says. “I know we both need the rest, but we talked about you showing me around the neighborhood where you used to live. Are you too tired?”
There’s too much worry in her voice for her to actually be wondering if I’m tired. It’s my sobriety she’s worried about, and even though I’ve spent the last several hours fighting a powerful desire to get high, I still hate that she thinks that. I don’t actually want to go back to Lincoln Center, where Juilliard is. I don’t want to go back to Manhattan at all.
But I’m not fragile. My sobriety is not so easily crushed. I aim these thoughts at the stupid part of my brain that clearly wants to relapse, and sit up. “Yeah, okay,” I say. “Let’s go.”
Jenna looks surprised. “Are you sure?”
I nod. “Yeah.”
She bites her lip, and I wait for her to ask if I’m worried about using. I want her to ask—I want to talk about it, but I don’t want her turning away from me like she so often does when the subject comes up. Or worse, stumbling through the conversation like I’m torturing her.
She doesn’t ask. “I can call security,” she says, “and have someone escort us—”
“Forget about security,” I say. “This city is so crowded, it won’t be hard to blend in. Put your hair up and grab your sunglasses. I know where we’re going well enough to look out for both of us.”
I’m surprised when she doesn’t argue. I think that anxious, drug-ready part of my brain wanted to pick a fight about that, but she just agreed, like she’s okay with it.
Now I’m less sure that I don’t need the second babysitter, but I can’t back down now. I grab a beanie and some sunglasses—thankfully it actually is sunny today, so we won’t look as much like celebrities who are trying to hide—and Jenna does that inexplicable thing where she somehow tucks and pins her red streaks under the rest of her black hair. She puts on a dark gray hoodie and a pair of sunglasses that are decidedly smaller than what a lot of celebrities wear—less obvious that way, she says—and we head out through the back of the hotel.
From there we hop a cab into Manhattan. The taxi driver doesn’t seem to recognize us, which isn’t a surprise.
Jenna holds my hand and stares out the tinted window, and I try to focus on the way this feels, riding over the Bridge with my hand in Jenna’s. I’m not eighteen anymore. I’m not alone, and I’m not high, and I’m not coming back from a party or a bender on my buddy’s floor.
I’m with Jenna, and if our careers are anything close to successful, we’re going to be back in this city at least a few times a year, possibly more. I want to believe it wasn’t the city itself that made me so unhappy here—New York isn’t some ex-girlfriend with whom I had a toxic relationship—but that’s how it feels. Not in the least because I still can’t fully account for the extent of my misery, at least before I started doing drugs.
“What was your favorite place to go?” Jenna asks.
I don’t answer for a minute. My favorite place was a club in the East Village where a friend of mine worked tending bar. She was a regular at the needle exchange program, and she had a passion for “using clean,” as she used to put it. So if I was out of needles I didn’t need to worry about buying more. I’d just go trade her for new ones, which she’d take to the next exchange event herself. She also dealt white heroin under the table, and I never got a bad hit from her.
I can’t tell Jenna that. Instead I shrug. “I don’t have a lot of good memories here.”
Jenna is quiet for a moment. This isn’t what she wants to hear. She wants the tour of where I used to live, where I went to school, where I performed and got coffee and lived my life. And I can show her all those things.
But just being back in New York, I can feel the oppressive hopelessness settling over me again. I hate myself for it. I was a rich kid with a full-ride fellowship at the top of his class. Other people my age get bored and take up rock climbing or skateboarding or, yeah, drink a little too much at parties.
I didn’t just get bored. I got morose, and then I self-destructed, like the entitled brat that I am.
We get out of the cab near the Lincoln Center subway station, and for a second I’m eighteen again, stepping out of the cab and looking up at the enormous glass front of The Juilliard School with anticipation.
I’m glad I’ve got the hat and the glasses, even if this is as close to the school as we’re going to get. It’s not AJ fans I worry will notice me here. I disappointed a lot of people at Juilliard, especially the professors who stuck up for me, even after my attendance started to slide. Seeing them here feels like the worst thing that could happen to me.
Yes. I am definitely avoiding steps seven and eight.
Jenna takes my hand and looks up at the building with me. I know she wants me to say something about it, but I search for the words. When I left I was in such a different place than I am now.
But being here again, I can’t help but wish I was an entirely different person.
“Do you regret dropping out?” Jenna asks. I look down and find her fiddling with the zipper on her hoodie, like she’s nervous.
Maybe I should have told her I wanted to sleep and stayed back at the hotel.
“No,” I say. “I regret ever having applied.”
She steps closer to me. People are jetting by us on the street at New York walking speed, which was always just a bit too fast for me. Jenna’s arm wraps around my waist. “What do you wish you’d done instead?”
I shrug. “I would have had to have been someone else. The kid I was in high school couldn’t imagine doing anything but applying here.”
The door opens, and I freeze. Two students come out, a guy and a girl, with their arms around each other.
I don’t recognize them. They’re probably underclassmen. But I still take Jenna’s hand and lead her down the street.
I want to close my eyes as I walk. The glasses aren’t enough to shield me from the memories of my mom dragging me into a cab to the airport, taking me home and then locking me in rehab like it was prison. I don’t blame her for it. She didn’t know what else to do.
It took me another two years to get my shit together.
“Talk to me?” Jenna asks.
We’re not walking fast enough. People are brushing past us, some of them annoyed. We fall into step behind a group of tourists—I can tell by the way they’re snapping pictures of the skyscrapers with their cell phones.
“I don’t know what to say.”
Jenna squeezes my hand. “Tell me how you feel?”
God, I don’t want to. Or I do, but not if she’s going to pull away. I can’t take the rejection right now.
I remember this line of thinking. I know it’s a cop-out.
“I feel like shit, okay?” It comes out sharper than I want it to.
“Because of how unhappy you were here?”
I nod. “And how little I deserved to feel that way. God, I had everything I’d ever wanted, you know? What the hell was my problem?”
“You just wanted to play,” Jenna says.
This is what I’ve told her. It’s what I’ve told myself. But right now, it doesn’t feel like enough. “I was playing. For hours. Every day.”
“Do you ever wish you’d been able to stay? If you could have found a way to be happy, I mean, without the . . .” She trails off, looking down at the dingy sidewalk. Not even able to say the word “drugs.”
I shoot her a look out the edge of my sunglasses. Jenna’s shoulders are hunching, like this is the last place she wants to be, and while I agree with her, I can’t help but feel like an asshole.
All she wanted was to take a moment a
nd share my past with me. And yeah, a lot of that past is shitty, but not all of it. Once I was this bright-eyed kid who felt like the world was his oyster. I’d wanted to come to New York. I’d worked toward it for years and years.
God, what the hell is wrong with me?
“No,” I say. “I like my life the way it is now.”
“You do, right?” Jenna asks, her voice hesitant.
I almost take off my sunglasses, but a forty-something couple across the street is eyeing us. They’ve noticed the sunglasses and are probably trying to figure out if they should recognize us. I’m still less recognizable than Jenna, but I’d rather not take the chance. I’m not in the mood to be gracious to fans.
“Do you think I don’t?” I ask.
Jenna bites her lower lip. “It’s been tense lately, yeah?”
My heart sinks. It has and we both know it. I turn to face her and almost get run down by a businessman in a suit. The street in Lincoln Center is not the place I want to have this conversation. “Come on,” I say, and I lead her over to Hearst Plaza, which is a park with a glassy pool and grassy stadium seating. We sit down on the lawn facing the pool, out of which juts two hunks of modern concrete art that are titled Reclining Figure, but from the right angle, I always thought they looked suspiciously like an O and a J. Maybe Henry Moore secretly loved orange juice. We’ll never know.
I put my arm around Jenna, but she’s right. It’s tense. “I’m not trying to keep stuff from you.”
She nods. “Are you mad about Grant?”
I’m even more confused about this question than I was the first time she asked it. I mean, yeah, I’m beyond pissed that he abused her, and that he sent those letters and went out of his way to scare her. But I don’t want to have the fight for the millionth time about how it’s not her fault. “No. Why would I be mad about that?”
She shrugs, and I can tell she doesn’t fully believe me. “I made a big deal out of it, and all he did was stand in the audience. Security never even found him.”
The Jenna Rollins Real Love Tour Page 6