Turns out, it is not easy to exit a bed when you are under the care of a private doctor. Eventually I stop fighting, mostly thanks to a sedative-filled needle the doctor jabs me with at my father’s command. The next time I open my eyes, I’m in restraints.
What follows is a week of assessments during which my father decides I won’t be starting at the New York office the following Monday after all. Instead, I’ll be put in the care of a private addiction specialist, who will oversee my rehabilitation here in the penthouse, where no one will see me. And after 90 days, I might earn back the privilege of following my father’s original plan that I start work under him at Cal-Mart’s Arkansas headquarters.
Over the course of the week, I don’t calm down so much as pretend I have calmed down. I agree to everything my father decrees and arrangements are made. They give me a new phone, claiming they couldn’t find the old one.
“I bet money that gal took it,” my father says. “Javon said she left you here to die. I doubt she’d think twice about stealing your phone on the way out.”
He’s baiting me. My heart tugs against his words, but I clench my teeth hard to keep from defending Sylvie. I need my father to think I believe the lies he had to have paid Javon to tell me about her. Need him to believe I’m back in line so he’ll leave me in the care of others just like he did to Mom.
But as soon as I am alone in the bathroom with my new smartphone, I dial the number for the Blackberry I gave Sylvie. It goes straight to voicemail but I leave a message anyway. I desperately need to talk to her, even more than I need to breathe.
“Sylvie, its Holt. I’m sorry for scaring you. But babe, I’m fine now. Call me back.” I pause before adding a very un-Calson-like, “Please. I need to hear from you. So please call me.”
After making the clandestine call, I return to my bed in the den and continue to behave like an upstanding young scion who deeply regrets having fucked up.
Eventually, the performance takes. Dad leaves four days into my assessment with a sharp order for me to get my goddamn shit together. Two days after that, Milavoc decides he and the nurse can leave me in the care of the addiction specialist scheduled to arrive later that afternoon.
I am so grateful for all they have done for me that I impulsively decide to go down in the elevator with them. And instead of breaking into a cold sweat and shaking like I want to, I steel myself and ask the doctor about my chances of getting better halfway through the ride.
Milavoc is still replying as we step off the elevator. I tell Javon to remain at his post because I’m going to walk my medical team to their cars parked in a nearby lot. Javon nods and I pretend not to feel his suspicious stare on my back as I exit the building, all the while listening to Milavoc’s stories about patients like me who were able to overcome addiction and depression and get a new lease on life.
I ask Milavoc so many follow up questions that I end up apologizing by the time we reach his Audi.
“No, believe me…I wish half my patients were as interested in their futures as you are. But you are young and you have your whole life ahead of you, Holt. I know you will be fine.”
“I hope so,” I answer, casting my eyes to the side in a way I can only hope comes off as abashed, since I wouldn’t even know the meaning of that word if I hadn’t come across it during those months of SAT prep.
And maybe it works…because both Milavoc and the nurse pat me on the arm and tell me everything is going to fall into place before they get into his car. I thank them and wave as they drive away…
Then I walk in the opposite direction of my skyscraper apartment until I find a liquor store. And from there, I make my way to Union Station where I get on the first 950 that shows up.
I’m more than halfway through the bottle by the time I make it into the back of a cab idling outside Union Station in Hartford.
“Where we going today, brother?” the driver asks. He has a heavy Jamaican accent, like Sylvie, but it is not nearly as musical or compelling. He eyes me with obvious suspicion through the rearview mirror. Probably because I’m hunched over in his back seat with a bottle of Grey Goose, trying not to lose it as I pull that first paystub Sylvie left on my desk out of my sweatpants pocket with a tremoring hand. “Take me to this address,” I tell him. Voice slurred with the Goose that is currently kicking my empty stomach’s ass.
He takes the stub, squints at it, and eyes me in the mirror some more. “This be in Blue Hills. What business you be having there?”
Fucking hell. I pull out a fistful of cash and throw it in the direction of the front seat. “Just fucking go,” I tell him as the crumpled bills fan out over the front seat.
The money must be enough to overcome his doubts because he pulls away from the curb and less than ten minutes later, we roll to a stop outside a tiny yellow house. The house is surrounded by an ugly chain link fence, but inside is a meticulous garden. It is both unexpected and beautiful. It isn’t just filled with colorful flowers, but also with a few rows of tomatoes, leafy greens, and a squat, bulbous light-green pepper I have never seen before.
The garden also has marigolds, and that is where I spot Sylvie. On her knees among the orange flowers, pulling up weeds.
“Wait here,” I tell the driver and get out without waiting for his reply.
I cross the street without looking left or right. Not because I’m reckless, but because I can’t focus on anything but Sylvie. But when I reach the fence, I stop short.
She is humming an upbeat song, one I don’t recognize. And she looks happy…content…more peaceful than I have ever seen her.
That’s the moment when I know the truth.
My father hadn’t lied. Sylvie did leave me up in that penthouse to die. And then she ran right back to her mommy and daddy.
But even after the truth slams into me with the power of a semi, I don’t turn and leave. That decision will me feel more ashamed than anything else in the days, months, and years that follow.
Not only don’t I leave, I stay on the cracked sidewalk outside her fence and make excuses for her, desperately trying to reconcile what she did.
I decide this has to be my fault somehow, as I watch her in the garden, pulling weeds like the boy she’d claimed to love had not OD’d a week ago.
Eventually, she looks up. Not because she senses me there, but because she has to toss the weeds. However, she freezes when she sees me, face so visibly stunned that for a moment hope flares in my chest. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe she hadn’t abandoned me like Javon said. Or if she had, maybe it had all been a mistake.
Deluded. This girl has me so deluded. Because I am honestly expecting her to say something nice to me. For her eyes to fill with worry as she asks, “Holt, what is wrong, my friend?”
But her stunned look soon disappears, morphing into something much worse. Fear. She tenses, looking toward the front door of the tiny house like she wants to make a run for it.
“Sylvie,” I call out to her before she can. Don’t run, I think at her. Soul tired. It feels like I have already run a thousand miles chasing after this girl. And between the leaden crushing world feeling and the alcohol, I don’t know that I have it in me to give chase again.
But at the sound of my voice, her face transforms again. This time an ugly anger appears, the type I never thought to see in Sylvie’s beautiful brown eyes.
And instead of bolting for the door, she comes straight at me, her dark face tight with fury as she hisses, “Go away. Go away now, Holt.”
Go away. “What do you mean?” I ask, honestly not understanding how she could turn on a dime like this. I mean, I know overdosing isn’t a good look, but… “You just left me there,” I say to her.
My head is swirling and I feel like I could pass out from being this far away from my building, but I stay on my feet because I want her to explain this to me. Want her to tell me exactly how she could claim to love me and agree to marry me and then leave me to die in my own vomit less than 24 hours later. But my tongue is too thi
ck with emotion and alcohol to translate everything I am feeling. So, I end up yelling, “What the fuck, Sylvie? What the fuck?!!”
Her eyes widen and she looks over her shoulder again, like she is afraid someone might have heard me. Then she lowers her voice to reply, “I’m not going to talk to you about this. I do not want you here. So just go away. Please, go away.”
I am still standing but it feels like the world is tilting on its axis. She can’t be telling me to go away. She can’t be. “Do you understand how much I fucking love you?” I ask her, emotion and alcohol cracking my voice. “I would do anything for you. Just…come home with me. Please, please, Sylvie.”
I am a Calson. There is a long list of entire countries that wish they had a GNP that matches the value of the stock options I received just for being born. But here I am, begging this girl. This nobody who will never make as much in her lifetime as I make in a single day. Here I am, pleading, “I will do anything, Sylvie. Just tell me what to do.”
I mean it. I will do anything. Give her anything.
But she looks at me like I am worse than the weeds she’s been pulling out of the ground. Then she answers, “I don’t want to be with you. I don’t know why you are so obsessed with me. But I do not want you. I do not love you. I just needed the job and a roof over my head, so I did what I had to do. Said what I had to say. But my parents have forgiven me, so please go away and leave me in peace.”
Leave me in peace, she says. Like I’m a menace. Like the happiest summer of my life was the worst of hers. I search her face for even a little bit of remorse and find nothing. Only contempt.
And then a voice says, “Who is that you speaking to, daughter?”
I look beyond Sylvie’s shoulder to see a woman. Stout and short with the same wide nose and high round cheeks as Sylvie.
“Nobody, Mommy,” Sylvie answers, backing away from me. “He is asking after someone I do not know.”
I can hear the click of the woman’s tongue all the way from where I’m standing. “Oh, these college boys get worse and worse by the year with them drugs. Boy! You get out this neighborhood now. Go back to your books. Education only thing you need, child. Go’on now! Go on before I call the police come get you!”
Is she serious? I wonder through my Goose haze. Does she not realize who I am? How easily I could ruin her daughter’s life, and hers, if she crosses me?
But…Sylvie’s angry eyes are burning a hole through my heart, and the hopelessness that should have hit me as soon as I woke up in that hospital bed suddenly crashes down with the force of a tsunami.
In the end, I do go’on, stumbling back to the cab like I stumbled to the phone in my mother’s bedroom after she jumped off the balcony. I’m told I called 9-1-1 and there’s even a tape of it floating around that got played on a few new shows when they reported my mother’s death. I’d called 9-1-1 even though I knew she was already dead. The Calson bias toward action…
The last thing I hear as I turn and head back to the cab is Sylvie’s mother still tutting about the “state of dem college boys dese days.”
“These women ain’t no good sometimes,” the driver says when I get back in the cab. “We all been there, brother.”
His tone is friendlier now. Commiserating. But I can barely hear him over all the feedback in my head.
A fool. I had made a fool of myself over her.
That’s all I can think about on the drive back to New Haven.
Javon is waiting curbside when I arrive at my building, and if he’s surprised to see me come home hours after I left in a cab, it doesn’t show.
But just in case I still had any doubts that my new phone doesn’t have a tracking device installed, he asks, “How was Hartford?”
“Tell me what happened that night,” I answer.
“The night you OD’d?” he asks, raising thick eyebrows. Probably because I cut him off before he was even a few sentences into the story the first and last time he tried to tell me.
“Yeah,” I answer, needing to know now in a way I didn’t want to know then.
“She came running down here at, like, 4:00 AM and she told me something was up with her family and she was going to catch the first bus out.”
“And she didn’t send you up to get me?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.
“Nah, sure didn’t. She just cut out.” Javon answers. “But I didn’t like the look in her eyes, so I came to check on you just in case…”
Javon trails off with a frown before he asks, “Did she tell the story different?”
I don’t answer, just breathe through my nose as I force myself to rewrite what I thought had happened between Sylvie and me this summer.
“You want to get inside?” Javon asks, his voice sounding as close as I have ever heard it to concerned.
You want to get inside?
I look around, and that’s when I notice it. The crushing feeling that has been plaguing me for months whenever I go outside. It’s gone. My legs don’t feel leaden, my mind isn’t screaming at me. And this time, it’s not due to a couple of popped or snorted pills, or the alcohol that steadily wore off on the trip back to New Haven.
You want to get inside?
The answer to that question is no, I decide. And despite the hot temperature outside, an icy chill settles over my heart as I say, “No, bring around the car.”
Proving he is worth every zero of his annual six-figure salary, Javon recalibrates without so much as a blink.
“Sure,” he says. “Where we going?”
“New York,” I answer.
My father doesn’t pay Luca six figures a year, so he looks a lot more surprised than Javon when I show up at his place on the Upper West Side.
Surprised and wary…
”Hey, Holt. What’s what?” he says carefully when he opens the door. Like a pitbull’s come for a visit.
He looks like shit, even more so when he angles his head into the hallway light. The entire right side of his face is mottled yellow and there is a dark purple bruise under one eye.
“Some dude catch you with his girlfriend?” I ask.
His brow lowers, eyes flickering with confusion. “No, some dude named Holt got pissed and hit me when I asked a few too many questions about the Jamaican girl he’d suddenly decided to keep at his apartment.”
And just when I thought I could not feel any more stupid about being duped by Sylvie.
But I don’t apologize. Don’t cry or make excuses either. That’s not the Calson way. And as of two hours ago, I have decided it is better to be a Calson than some fragile head case whose heart can easily be shattered by a girl who is only pretending to give two shits about him.
“Tell you what,” I say, instead of apologizing. “You take me to your tailor and I’ll buy you a new suit, too. Two if you let me stay here for a couple of weeks.”
Luca’s sleepy eyes become even more hooded. “You need a new suit? And a place to stay? For what?”
“For work,” I answer. “I’m starting at the Cal-Mart New York offices on Monday, so I’ll need to look the part.”
II
Ixtapa
Chapter Ten
Ten Years Later, New York
HOLT
“Mr. Calson?”
I look up from the text I’m sending to Zahir who’s in town tonight. Della, the PR consultant we hired when I was named acting CEO of Cal-Mart, stands in front of my office’s drop-down screen looking back at me expectantly.
“Do you have any initial thoughts?” she asks. Then she steps back so I have an unobstructed view of the screen which displays the headshots of nine beautiful women, tiled in a three-by-three square.
Della has done a good job, I decide, even though I hadn’t listened to a word of her presentation. Looking like a hopeful new crop of Bachelor contestants, the women on the screen offer fetching smiles. They’re all beautiful and just a few years north of twenty-five. Babymakers who Della believes will provide me with a second heir and merge
well into my carefully crafted brand: Holt Calson, Trustworthy Billionaire of the People.
“I’d like to narrow the number of candidates down to six, then we can reach out to the top three for in-person meet and greets.”
So, all I need to do is eliminate six in total. Should be easy enough, but turns out it’s not. I study the square that makes up the final slide in Della’s Power Point deck. There are five blondes, three brunettes, and one redhead. But they’re so interchangeable that they remind me of one of those fashion avatar apps that lets users change everything but the underlying body. I feel the same about their bios. Nine women from good families who became doctors, lawyers, professional dancers, and nonprofit associates just like Mommy and Daddy wanted. Not a single disappointment in the bunch—I know this for certain because Della made sure each woman underwent a discreet background check—which means the chances of any of them smashing through a guardrail while loaded up with valium and alcohol is pretty damn slim. Unlike what happened with my first wife two years ago.
Each of Della’s candidates is a perfect specimen of womanhood. And I know every last one of them would be thrilled at the opportunity of marrying a guy like me after the prequisite year or two of dating in the spotlight is over. I should feel relief and the faint stirrings of anticipation. Instead, I want to yawn.
My phone buzzes, loudly vibrating on the glass table in front of me. I pull my eyes from the giant square of female perfection and see the green bubble of an incoming text. It’s Zahir, replying to the text I sent earlier.
Me: “Luca says you’re in town? Meet up?”
Zahir: “Yes. Drinks at Luca’s club tonight?”
It’s been a while since I saw either of my former Beaumont suitemates. And though none of us swing that way, I’m a hell of a lot more excited about spending time with Zahir and Luca than I am about taking any of Della’s candidates out on a date.
“Holt?” Della asks again.
Ruthless Tycoons: The Complete Series (Ruthless Billionaires Book 3) Page 9