“Marco,” I say, and the idea that hits me feels so terrible, it makes my hands grow immediately cold. “You don’t think Sam had anything to do with it, right? Calling the press? Like, we agree this was all Ian.”
“We agree it was all Ian.” His mouth turns down into a grim line. “I know that doesn’t make it any easier. From what Gwen told me, Sam was as shocked about all this as any of us. He’s going to go retreat to his support system, and you need to go home to yours. Your mom flew down about an hour ago. She’ll be at your place when you get to LA.”
I take a few seconds to press the heels of my hands to my eyes. I don’t know what his support system looks like. His ex-wife is going to have her hands full. Roberta and Luther are gone. Does Sam even have a manager? This is going to be a pain in the ass for me, but it is going to be brutal for him, and he’s going to need all the help he can get.
I know this, and I keep repeating it over and over, but when we reach the Oakland airport almost three hours later and I still haven’t heard from him, my stomach feels like a hard, sour pit. Everything’s a mess. Between the last-minute flight, the stress of knowing this story is out there and the message is careening out of control, and the chaos of the press—there’s so much happening. Maybe his phone is being inundated. Maybe he just turned it off. Maybe he doesn’t have my number—why would he? Maybe it’s going to take a few calls to find me, and maybe he assumed, like I should, that we’ll figure it all out when the dust settles.
* * *
After the cabin at the farm, my house feels enormous and sterile. The art I used to see as minimalist and clean just looks lonely on the expansive white walls. My living room—filled with white furniture I once thought of as inviting and cloud-like—just seems overly precious; not anything someone could actually collapse on at the end of a day.
Even my bedroom is too big, too empty, too impersonal.
Oddly, just imagining Sam here with me—stretching out long and muscular on my bed, reading on my couch in socks and sweats, whistling while he cooks dinner at my massive stove—makes this house feel incrementally warmer. For the first time in my life I get it: home isn’t always a space; it can be a person.
I turn and stare out the window while Mom folds laundry on my bed.
“Will you still see your dad for Christmas?” She smooths one of my shirts on the bedspread, folds it into perfect thirds, and places it on top of the stack.
I pick at the hem of my sweatpants. “We left the farm as if everything was okay but… I don’t think so.”
She gives me a sad smile. “I’m sorry, hon.”
With a groan, I fall back against one of the pillows. The cotton is cool against the back of my neck. “I don’t really know why I’m surprised.”
“Because he’s your dad. He should be better than that.”
I shrug, feeling oddly numb. “Yeah, but he’s always shown me exactly who he is, and I just never want to believe it.” I give myself to the count of ten to feel sorry for myself before I sit up, crossing my legs. “I might have a shitty dad, but I have a fantastic freaking mom. Some people don’t even get that. I’m not complaining.”
Mom gives me a sweet little grin and leans forward to press a quick kiss to my forehead. “If I hadn’t met him, there wouldn’t be a you. It’s hard to regret it, but I’m sorry that you have to deal with the same egotistical jackass I left all those years ago. Heaven forbid he grow up a little.” Straightening again, she reaches for another shirt. “Have you talked to Nana?”
Oof. Guilt shimmers through me, and I shake my head. “I’m worried she’s going to give me a mountain of I-told-you-so’s and a prolonged silent treatment.”
“I don’t think so. I think she’s worried about you, but in typical Mom fashion, she hasn’t wanted to talk much about it because you know as well as I do that she isn’t one to relish the I-told-you-so’s.”
I know Mom is right that Nana doesn’t relish it, per se, but it would still be first thing on her tongue. She barely forgave me for London. Her disapproval was as quiet as Nana herself, but it’s always been there—in the slight angle away from me when my career comes up or the long exhale and slowly raised coffee cup to her lips when a trailer for one of Dad’s films comes on the television.
“This is going to make a mess for her, too,” I say, and then groan, falling back against the pillow again. “People are going to come into the café again and ask her for pictures. There’s nothing Nana hates more than covert selfies people take with her in the café.”
Mom laughs at the image of this. “Well, she needs to retire anyway.” She nudges me off the bed. “She came down here to see you, so go talk to her. And go eat something,” she calls after me. “Life goes on.”
* * *
Charlie is sitting on my kitchen counter, eating a piece of the blackberry pie Nana brought down from Guerneville. Other than the iPhone near Charlie’s hip, it is an image so immediately familiar it’s almost easy to forget that we’re thirty-two and not sixteen.
I look out the window with a view of the long, immaculate driveway. The entrance is blocked by a fifteen-foot-tall iron gate, and surrounded by trees and shrubbery, but I can still see a few photographers pacing just on the other side. I count four of them. One looks like he’s eating an apple. Another is telling a story, gesticulating wildly. They’re chatting so casually; they’re more like coworkers hanging out in a break room than paparazzi stalking me.
“They still out there?” Nana asks from the kitchen table. I glance over just as she straightens the already-neat rows of playing cards in front of her.
“They’ll hover for days.” Charlie groans around a bite of pie.
I shake my head, wanting to refute this, but my words come out thin and reedy. “I bet they’ll get bored and leave soon.”
Nana peers at me over the tops of thick glasses as if to say, Do you think I was born yesterday?
Sensing the tension, Charlie hops off the counter. “I’m gonna shower.” She plugs in her phone, flipping it facedown. It occurs to me she’s been glaring at it off and on. Whatever she’s seeing, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know. “Let me know if something happens,” she says on her way out.
Reaching for the kettle, I fill it with water and turn on the stove. “Nana, do you want some tea?”
“I’ll have tea if you’ll stay away from that window and come sit down.”
I take the seat next to her.
“Where’s your mom?” she asks.
“She was doing laundry,” I say. “Most of it’s already washed, but you know how she is.”
Nana scoops the cards together and shuffles them between her hands. These are the hands that taught me how to make pies, that put on Band-Aids after I fell and helped me learn to tie my shoes. They look so different now than they did then. Her hands used to be smooth, strong, and capable. Now her joints are swollen with arthritis, her skin marked by age.
“She does like her laundry,” Nana says, “but mostly I think she likes to keep busy.”
I grin at her. “Sounds like someone else I know.”
She laughs as she continues to shuffle the cards. “I don’t know. I’ve learned to enjoy the quiet times. Definitely not up making pies at four in the morning like I used to be.”
I’m grateful that Nana and Mom have apprentices of sorts—a younger woman named Kathy and her cousin Sissy—taking over much of the responsibility of the café. But mention of the Nana I grew up with knocks the words loose inside me. “I’m sorry about all this,” I say. “About what’s happening outside… and before.”
She splits the deck in half, gives me one stack, and then turns over her first card. Nana motions for me to do the same. I laugh when it registers that, for all of her card expertise, she’s set us up to play the simplest game ever: War.
“You think I can’t handle cribbage or gin, Nana?”
“I think you should give that brain of yours a little break.”
I can’t exactly argue with
that.
When I reveal a four, she slides it with her seven into her pile and flips her next card. “I haven’t talked about your grandpa in a while,” she says. “Do you remember anything I’ve told you about him?”
The air in the room seems to go still. Nana and I have always communicated primarily about practicalities: What needs to be done before the breakfast rush. How I need to use colder water for the pie crust. When is it a good time to come down for the holidays. When are my breaks this year.
We don’t talk about her past, her feelings, and certainly not about her husband, who died decades ago. In fact, he died long before I was even born. It wasn’t until Grandpa passed away that Nana decided to open the café, had the freedom to do it.
“I know he was in the army and fought in the war,” I say. “Mom said he loved blackberries and fishing in the river, and she has his eyes. But you and Mom don’t talk much about him.”
“That’s probably because he was a hard man to love,” she says. “And when he died, I think I figured, if I found a difficult man when I was young and pretty, there was no hope for me finding an easy one when I was older, tired, and had a kid.”
I’m so focused on what she’s saying that she has to tap my stack of cards as a reminder to take my turn. I flip over my card—a seven to her ten. She takes them both.
“I know she had her own reasons, but your mom never tried again either.” She flips over a card, a two. It is not at all satisfying to take it with an ace. “She loved your dad. They were genuinely happy for a while, but afterward, she didn’t want to bother with men either.”
“Must be the Houriet women curse,” I say darkly. I finally turned my phone off a couple hours ago. I’d been looking at it every few minutes, waiting for Sam to call. A watched pot never boils, and a watched phone never rings.
Nana pauses with her next card midair. “Tate. I never wanted that for you. I never wanted you to be closed off like that.” She leans in, catching my eyes. “No matter what happens this time with Sam, I’m glad you tried again.”
Hot tears pool in my eyes, and Nana waves the sentiment away to quickly change the subject. “Have you had anything to eat?”
Before I answer, there’s a commotion outside—a chorus of shouting voices followed by the purr of an engine rolling up the drive. I move to the window; relief is a warm flush through my limbs when I see Marco’s car.
But once we all meet him at the door, he steps inside, expression grim. “How’s everything here?”
“Have you talked to Sam?” I ask immediately, a little taken aback when he ignores my question and heads straight to the scotch I keep stocked on a bar cart in the living room.
We wait in tense silence while he pours himself a glass and takes a long drink. “Have you seen any of the headlines?” he asks me finally.
A blend of anxiety and irritation simmer in my gut. Gwen has some powerful connections in this town, and I’ve been optimistic in thinking that she’ll be able to pull some strings and get this handled quickly.
“I haven’t looked because I know you’re just starting damage control and I don’t want to freak out,” I say. “Isn’t that what you told me to do? Keep my head down, hang tight until you got here?”
His eyes swing to Charlie. “What about you?”
The moment stretches as they hold each other’s gaze. Finally she gives a small nod.
“Do you want to show her?” he asks.
“Show me what?” I ask, looking between them. “Marco, how bad is it? What the hell is going on?”
Charlie’s shoulders slump in resignation before she walks to the kitchen and returns with her phone in her hand.
“Just scroll,” she says, and tries to hand it to me.
“No,” I say, pushing it away. “I’m not on social media because I don’t want to see people’s shitty opinions.”
Marco sighs. “Tate.”
Finally, I take her phone and look at the stories in the Twitter column under the hashtag #TateButler. A link to a TMZ article is right up top, and I open it.
We’ve all read the story: Tate Butler—daughter of superstar Ian Butler—was kept out of the limelight until she was eighteen and ready for her star to shine. Or so we thought. In a blockbuster exclusive this week, we report that Tate and her team weren’t the ones who engineered Tate’s launch back into the public eye, it was a scheming teenage lover, set on cashing in, and eighteen-year-old Tate was blindsided.
And it looks like he’s back in the picture. S. B. Hill—the pen name for a Vermont native named Sam Brandis—is the screenwriter of Milkweed (which just wrapped shooting this week in Mendocino, starring—you guessed it—Tate and Ian Butler). He’s also the man who sold Tate Butler out all those years ago. Is their reunion a romantic twist of fate, or is he back for another publicity grab?
Article after article says the same general thing.
“This is insane!” I toss Charlie’s phone down on the couch. “Come on.”
“I agree it’s ridiculous,” Marco says. “But it’s also the current narrative, and everyone—and I do mean everyone—is running with it.”
“What are you doing to fix this?” I feel my voice thinning out, growing hysterical. One look at Marco and I’m reassured that my demands aren’t bothering him; he knows I’ve hit a proverbial wall.
“I’ve reached out to my contacts at AP and most of the networks.” Marco takes a deep breath. “But Sam isn’t refuting it, and neither is Ian.”
“Then get me an interview. I’ll explain it.”
Marco is already shaking his head.
“What about a statement?” Mom asks.
“We’ll issue a statement,” Marco explains patiently, “but we have to coordinate with Gwen and the studio, and that is not a fast-moving machine. Ultimately, this is on Sam, too. If he doesn’t get out in front of this and face the music, he looks like an opportunistic monster.”
“So we get out in front of this now and tell them the truth,” I say.
“And what’s that exactly?” Marco says quietly. “That he did exactly what everyone is saying he did?”
“You know that’s not true,” I practically shout. “They’re twisting everything. If we explain—”
“Tate, I need you to listen. You said you trust me, right?”
My heart is racing in my chest, adrenaline pumping. I manage a short nod.
“Then trust me to do my job. All these people care about is a sound bite. Something titillating enough to get people to click. They don’t care about excuses or extenuating circumstances because nobody has the attention span to read more than a headline or a tweet. In this version you come off looking like the victim, yeah, but also weak and gullible. That is not who you are or the brand we’ve created. Let Sam worry about Sam’s brand. We need to get out of here for a while and let the studio come up with a message. Then we talk about an interview.”
“I need to talk to Sam. I need to find him.”
“He doesn’t want to be found, Tate. I’ve tried. Nobody can get ahold of him.”
I let that sink in. Was I wrong about him again?
Did I get tricked again?
“Okay.” I let out a long, slow breath. I’ve done this before—picked up my pieces and carried on. I can do it again. “When do we leave?”
twenty-seven
MARCO MAKES ARRANGEMENTS FOR us to stay somewhere sequestered from the press. Before sending us out the back way, with a few security guys leaving in decoy cars, he also suggests I get in touch with some of my friends in the media or with big online followings. Not to give an official statement, but a quick call to convey that I know what’s happening, my team is on top of it, and I’ll reach out as soon as I’m able to say something concrete.
As usual, it was the perfect move. Now there are a handful of tweets along the lines of:
I know Tate and this story isn’t accurate.
Don’t believe everything you read.
Everyone needs to calm the hell down an
d wait for the real story to come out.
The tide changes, as it so often does online. My friends’ tweets are retweeted with confident commentary:
The knee-jerk reaction is never right
You fools jumped on that too fast
Get outta here with your drama shit
The rebuttals may not be entirely fair, but they’re enough to allow me to take a breath.
* * *
The house Marco finds for us is a breath of fresh air. I didn’t want a city, and I didn’t want the country or a cabin in the woods where I’d be reminded of Ruby Farm. Instead we drive to San Diego, take a flight to South Carolina, drive to Murrells Inlet, and pull up in front of a two-story, gray-sided house that’s surrounded by beach and ocean. The clock reads 6:30 a.m. when I finally collapse into my bed with the Atlantic Ocean just outside my window.
I pull the blankets over my head, blocking out the burgeoning sunlight and wishing I could shut out the static in my brain just as easily. My mind is going haywire. The relationship I wanted with my dad is never going to happen. I let Sam back in, ignoring the voice in my head telling me to be careful this time. Regardless of how he feels or whatever circumstances are keeping him from reaching out, it doesn’t change that I am in the exact same position now I was then: alone, embarrassed, duped.
I want to put a name to this feeling and call it love. I’ve never felt before or since what I feel for Sam, and it’s a devotion so intense it makes me feel carved out and filled up with something warm and pliable. It’s like having a hundred hummingbirds in my blood, thrumming. Even thinking about him now is distraction enough from the madness of the gossip machine.
But he hasn’t called, hasn’t tried to get in touch with me. It doesn’t take that long to fly from California to Vermont. Has he decided what we have isn’t worth it? And am I really lying here wondering if I’m good enough for Sam Brandis again?
Twice in a Blue Moon Page 25