by Lisa Samson
I end the call and suddenly the bright idea to call a cab lights up the darkness of “I’m-thirty-two-years-old-and-clueless,” and I can only hope the sight of my own blood veiled the obvious solution to my problem because right now I feel more stupid than that rake.
And there it sits, Big Mike’s card, where I left it by the coffeemaker on kitchen table number one. Every once in a while my cluttered ways help me out.
Don’t take a chance, the card says. Any time, any day, any way.
“I’m ten minutes away,” he says after I’ve spilled out the story. “Can you hang on?”
“I’ll be out front.”
“Hang in there, baby. Hang tight.”
I love him.
I love Big Mike.
In the ten minutes it takes for him to arrive, I bind a towel around my thigh, relieved the pressure is working to keep the wound from soaking the terrycloth completely. I tape it in place with duct tape from a roll I keep atop kitchen table number two. Before I can hurry upstairs to put on a decent skirt or dress, Big Mike arrives, honking furiously. He jumps out and runs up the walk.
Wait till he gets an eyeful of me in dusty-pink pajama bottoms with a bloody tear at the left leg, my beastly black sweater, and, jamming my feet inside them, a pair of green Wellingtons so old the rubber has begun to dry rot.
Beautiful.
“University okay?” he asks, helping me into the backseat of his clean cab.
“Okay. Whatever you think.”
He slides into his seat. “Folks seem to have the best response when I pick them up there.” He pulls out with that cabdriver ease, that slouchy curve, quick yet smooth, and the picture of steady nonchalance. “I do this all day every day,” it says. I need that kind of calm right now.
He heads up Howard toward Green Street and a hospital so large my stitches will seem like a breather compared to all the victims carted in by Medevac.
Big Mike turns off the talk-radio heads on WBAL and the local diatribe against our mayor and the governor. Politics. Even messier than my basement. Brandon always says when asked about politics in interviews, “A sector of society that’s even more in need of a good spanking than Hollywood.”
I have to stifle a laugh. Maxim first recorded the quote and I don’t think a single American citizen disagreed.
“Let me put on some soothing music,” Big Mike says, switching to FM and a classical station.
What am I going to do? This will eat up the rest of my afternoon and I’ll have no time to get ready for Brandon’s arrival. I may not have a stylist anymore, but I remember how to present myself as a star. Still, I need a good three to four hours to do it. So much of it is about the hair.
After gardening, I planned to head over to Rite Aid, purchase a color rinse and some hot rollers because, in all my supply purchases, I never brought home beauty equipment. I wanted to stay as far away from artifice as possible.
And hair spray. Gotta have hair spray.
But now I’ll be lucky if I can scrape this mousy gerbil nest into a proper bun.
It’s not that I care what those who read the Hollywood gossip blogs or the entertainment rags actually think; I’d simply rather forgo the maelstrom of negativity. A good presentation before disappearing once again prior to the interview will be a lot smoother. The public will write me off as “living a quiet life and doing well,” thereby allowing me to circumvent a feeding frenzy.
Because despite what people might think of such scrutiny, assigning it as merely something that “comes with the territory” of wealth and fame, it’s painful nonetheless, and it’s an exquisite pain because no matter how much you tell yourself not to take it personally, and how lame you feel for having done so, you can’t help but do so.
Big Mike checks on me every couple of minutes until he breaks for good by the emergency room entrance. I pay him with the last twenty in my wallet, and when he gives me the change he says, “You keep me posted if you have the time, all right? And you’ll be fine. I’ve taken a lot worse here. I could tell you some stories!”
“I’ll bet.” I can’t help but laugh.
“You’ll be all right!” he calls as I hobble inside to a full waiting room, one seat left.
That qualifies as a miracle if you ask me, not because it actually is a miracle, but because I want it to be.
After registering at the desk and inwardly thanking the Screen Actors Guild for my health coverage, I sit down, nursing my thigh, encircling it with my hands.
I look right at home with so many of the other inhabitants of the room. In fact, it looks pretty much like every emergency room scene you’ve ever seen in a movie. The same ragtag patients and their tagalong attendants. The smelly, the scared, the annoying, the quiet, the inappropriately loud, the cell phone talker and the pacer, those who are alone and those who wish they were, all present and accounted for.
When a woman about my age wearing powder-blue sweats and an Ocean City T-shirt snaps my picture with her smart phone, I realize it’s all over.
All the plans to beat Jessica to the punch, to plan a “free and fashionable” comeback, to travel to New York City and stay at the St. Regis, unravel like an unfettered braid. I’m still just Fiona Hume, fallen bad girl and general screwup. That’s what they’ll say.
And maybe they’re right.
Tempting though it is, I don’t ask her to refrain from sending it off to that monkey-faced lard-ass Perez Hilton or whatever acid-penning blogger she’s dispatching it to right now with a smug, superior grin stretching her closed red lips.
What would be the point?
If not her, someone else. I learned that lesson young.
My father will be snapped at the Baltimore-Washington Airport, various assumptions will be made and repeated as cosmic truth, and I’ll retreat once again into the noise and clutter that dangles and flutters in the place of my own making.
Ninety minutes later, still in the waiting room, a text from Jack lights up my screen.
Where are you, Fi?
University.
I’m on my way. Don’t leave yet!
I look down at my leg and my grimy pj’s.
Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.
Fourteen
I call Josia’s number at the forge and tell him what happened.
“I’ll be right there,” he says, obviously willing to drop everything.
“No, that’s okay. A friend is on his way right now.”
My name is finally called and I feel like I’ve won a contest I was forced to enter.
“I gotta go, Josia. They’re finally getting to me.”
“Call if you need anything, Fia. I’m always around. Keep me posted if you have it in you.”
“Thanks, Josia.”
As the doctor, a Korean woman in lavender scrubs and pearls, stitches me back together, her slightly nervous chatter informs me she recognizes me but is too professional to mention it.
Thank God.
Which makes me realize with a sense of shame that dressed normally, I can walk and bike about the city unrecognized. But dress me like a heroin addict who can’t get out of her pajamas in the morning or keep from wounding herself by her own abject stupidity, and the resemblance is unmistakable.
I guess you have to come to a place in time where, having kicked everyone to the curb, there’s nobody left but yourself to blame if you still haven’t moved on.
Let’s call that Mount Reality. Because I’m standing on top of it right now.
Jack has charmed a nurse’s aide into escorting him into the inner sanctum. I can hear his easy voice as they approach the curtain. “I may not technically be family, per se, but I’m all she’s got left now.” I know he doesn’t believe that for a second, and I smile despite the numbing needle going in and out of my thigh.
“Oh, I understand,” the aide whispers, tying the laces of conspiracy and pity around her words in hopes of binding herself to Jack in one small way, even for a moment.
He walks int
o the room dressed in jeans and a baseball shirt, looking beautiful to me.
He sets his cap on the rolling tray table. “I was mid-flight from Lucy’s when you called the first time. I came from the airport.”
The sight of his face shines the first ray of hope I’ve had since that woman snapped my picture.
He scoots a chair close to the bed. “Can I see?” he asks the doctor.
“Sure,” she says as she continues to stitch.
“Wow, that’s bad, Fia.”
“And the rake was rusted, so yay,” I inform him.
“Don’t worry.” The doctor looks up. “You’ll be getting a tetanus shot.”
Yay for that too.
Jack screws up his face. “I hate needles.”
“Good thing it’s not you on this table,” I say. “Thanks for coming right over.”
“Of course. When you called . . . well, I’m glad you called.”
The doctor cuts the final suture, then begins dressing the wound as we watch, silent. She finishes, stands, and peels off her latex gloves. “I’ll have that tetanus shot ordered, and after that you can go. We’ll include instructions on changing your bandage, but you’ll need to get it looked at again in a few days just to make sure everything’s all right.”
Beautiful.
She throws the garbage in a pedal-powered trash can, washes up, then leaves the room.
“Wow,” Jack says again. “Fia, what happened?”
I run down the agenda of a day that’s clearly not living up to what I had in mind. Good thing I made that list.
“And now it’s after five, and my father is flying in tonight.”
“Oh, geez, Fi. I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.” The story of the cell phone photographer comes next. “I don’t even want to check what’s happened since. I mean, look at me.”
He takes my hand. “Do you want me to take a peek on Twitter?”
I nod. “I mean, if nothing’s there and she just wanted to show her friends or whatever, I could be worrying for nothing.”
“True. Okay, hold on a sec.” His fingers, long and with neatly trimmed nails, skate across the slick surface of his phone. He types my name across the search strip.
His brows knit together and he sighs. “Well, it’s out there already and you haven’t even left the hospital.”
Amazing, isn’t it?
I hate the world sometimes.
“And with my father flying in tonight . . .”
He shakes his head. “What terrible timing.”
“To make matters worse, I was going to try to make myself a little more presentable, but here we are at—what time is it, exactly?”
“Five forty-five.”
“Five forty-five and he’ll be landing in less than two hours.”
“Come to my place, Fia. You can stay there while he’s in town. He can even stay there too. I’m assuming you want him to think you’re doing great.”
What he’s really saying stings a little, but I can’t see any other way around it. There’s something comforting about the fact that I haven’t fooled him.
“Okay. Let’s just swing by my house on the way so I can grab some clothes.”
There’s simply no other way at this point. No spree with Josia’s rent money. Just a trip up to the Hollywood Room and nothing more. I’ll manage because I have to.
My tetanus shot administered, instructions and prescriptions handed to me, we exit the hospital and start walking to the small lot where Jack parked the old Porsche he restored himself several years ago. Flashes from three photographers’ cameras blind me.
I don’t even bother holding up my hand to cover my face. What’s the point? It doesn’t matter.
You hide; you’re found.
You try to shake off those who tail you, you pull off the highway, but if you venture out on the road, even for a second, they’ll find you. You just have to use your wits not to let them run you over. This is our world. There is no privacy. And even the illusion of it has wafted away in the breeze of our own morbid curiosity and self-disclosure.
Jack sits me in the passenger seat and hurries to his side of the car. The engine thrums under the turn of his key, and soon we’re pulling away. He’s practically as smooth as Big Mike.
“Fia, I’m really sorry about all this.”
“It’s okay. It comes with the territory. I had just forgotten about it. It’ll teach me to stay away from rakes, I can tell you that.”
“Good policy. It’s why I live in a small rowhouse. No leaves. No rakes.”
I laugh. It feels good next to him in his car, on terms not exactly of my own making or choosing, granted, but I can choose for it to be okay. And so it’s okay. It’s more than okay.
A few minutes later he swings onto Mount Vernon Place and I point to my house. “That one there. The haunted one. Just pull up and I’ll run in and grab my things.”
He says nothing about my big house or its raggedy appearance as he cuts the engine and then circles the vehicle to assist me. “Want me to come in and help you?”
“No!”
“Sorry, sorry.”
“That was harsh. I just . . . can’t.”
“It’s okay. Don’t rush,” he says. “Take your time or you’ll open that wound again.”
I examine his face, searching for disappointment, horror, disgust, even mild surprise. Nothing’s there but good old Jack.
By the time I eke my way inside and grab several changes of clothing from my room and the Hollywood shrine, shove it all into a tote bag, and inch back outside to his car, it’s almost seven o’clock.
“Let’s get you back,” he says after placing my bag in the trunk and resuming his seat behind the wheel. “You can clean up, get ready, and when your dad arrives, we’ll make sure he’s entertained and happy for his daughter.”
“What a scam.”
“Hey, you did the same thing for me with Lucy. The least I can do is return the favor.”
“Is that what we were doing? Convincing her you’re happy?”
He pauses. “Yes. Yes, I guess it was.”
Funny how you can misjudge a person’s emotional state. “I thought you were happy. You always seem to be.”
He slides the car into first gear and pulls away. “Oh, a lot about my life pleases me. I have material comfort, which I never take for granted, a good career, and you know how much I love my house. But it’s missing one thing.”
And she’s sitting next to you in the front seat.
Well, this is new. It has seemed that most of my life I couldn’t make anybody happy. And now it appears I am the one thing that could make this other person happy.
Either way, it’s just too much pressure.
Fifteen
After I wash myself in a sort of standing bath, Jack helps me scrub my hair at the kitchen sink. He takes his time, fingertips going deep into my hair, massaging my scalp.
A little to the right. Left. Up on top. Down the sides. By the nape of my neck. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
“Don’t feel you have to go to all that trouble,” I say, hoping he won’t listen to my advice.
“You need this more than the washing. Man, your muscles are tense.”
“Not surprisingly.”
His fingertips press circles into the nape of my neck, moving sideways to the depressions behind the lobes of my ears.
“Have you checked Twitter?” I ask.
“Shh. That will keep. Just relax, Fi.”
So I do, shifting all my weight onto my right leg, my body leaning into his.
After he’s finished, my hair rinsed, conditioned, then rinsed again, he gathers it into a soft, ivory towel and leads me toward the living room.
The sky holds on to the final periwinkle glow of the day outside the sliding glass doors as eight o’clock, and Brandon, approach. Oh, man, I love this town so much. My heart swells at the purple of my city in a dying day. I’m not LA. I’m this right here.
I step forward. “Wou
ld you check Twitter?” I ask. “I promise I won’t ask again. I just want to know what my father is going to see when he gets off the plane.”
He helps lower me down on the sofa, one of those deceptively large affairs that won’t let you go from its softness once you descend. A winey red, it’s littered with pillows for every purpose. His fingers curl around one of them, a tube of softness for the neck, and set it on the simple white cube of a coffee table in front of us. When he lifts my leg to settle it on top, I want to scream in agony. But there’s no way I’m taking those painkillers and risking stepping on that road again. That’s way too much pain to experience again. I’d rather go for the quick flare of healing than the slow burn of suffering.
At least I learned that much.
“Do you have any ibuprofen?” I ask.
“Sure thing.”
He doesn’t ask why because he doesn’t have to. He returns with the bottle and a glass of orange juice.
“Thanks.”
As I take the pain reliever, he reaches for his phone.
He blows a whistle from his lips. “Wow, Fi, you’re obviously not forgotten.”
“That bad?” I take the pill.
“Oh, you’ve still got your defenders out there and they’re working overtime.”
I rest the glass on my good thigh. “Really?”
“Yes.”
“But overall?”
He shuts off the phone’s screen. “Do I have to spell it out? I’d rather not.”
“Okay. That’s probably for the best.”
“Trust me on that one. Drink your juice. You don’t want to get dehydrated. I assume you lost a lot of blood?”
He’s right. I nod and start sipping, but with more intent.
“On the upside,” he says with a laugh, “I’m now one of those ‘mystery men.’ ”
“Oh man. I’m so sorry, Jack.”
“Don’t be. At least my car was clean.”
Our laughs join in the presence of his practicality.
“Really, Fia. Don’t sweat anything on my account. I can handle it.”