Except, even if there’s some outlandish reason he was such a dick last summer, he’ll still be Six’s brother who lives in Somalia. Clinging to my dislike, at this point, seems…prudent.
That night, at Six’s suggestion, we have dinner “together” though we aren’t even on the same continent.
We convene at nine PM my time, four PM his, me in my room while he sits at the hotel bar with his phone propped up on the center of the table.
I’m yawning even as the conversation starts. “Sorry,” I tell him. “I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night and I can’t fall back asleep after.”
He grins, raising his empty glass to someone I can’t see. “As long as you don’t wake me up once I get there. You know how pissed I get when my beauty sleep is interrupted, and apparently Sloane is cranky enough for all of us.”
“They don’t seem all that thrilled to see each other again,” I venture.
He shoves a piece of salmon in his mouth. “Probably because long-distance relationships never work,” he says.
That statement sits poorly, given that it’s in the nature of our jobs to be apart more often than not. “You seem to be forgetting,” I reply with a disgruntled laugh, “that you invited me on this trip because you wanted long-distance with me.”
“It’s totally different,” he argues. “Under normal circumstances, Josh only gets to leave once a year. How the hell do you even make once a year work? He was only home last summer because they were all forced to evacuate.”
I set my drink down. “Evacuate?”
“Some explosion at the camp,” he says, already bored by the topic. “A lot of the staff didn’t return but Saint Joshua, of course, had to go back.”
There’s a weird twist in my stomach. I knew Josh’s work wasn’t glamorous, wasn’t the height of luxury, but I didn’t think it was a place where things explode. “So…it’s dangerous there? He could get hurt?”
He groans loudly, taking a drink from the waitress and chugging half of it in one go. “Please, Drew, do not join the Joshua Bailey fan club with everyone else. He’s totally safe, and I really need just one person in my life who isn’t taking his side, okay?”
“I’m not taking anyone’s side,” I reply. “You make it sound like there’s a battle going on and you’re not even here.”
“Exactly,” he replies. “I’m not there. And you know what my mother wants to talk about? Poor Joshua and Sloane, and how she wishes they were getting along, while my dad basically just reams me out and then tells me how glad he is Josh turned out well. I’m the one who just toured the world and is about to play at South by Southwest, but shit’s the same way it’s always been: nothing I could ever do will equal what Josh does.”
I know what it’s like to be the kid who isn’t as good, who can’t quite win a parent’s heart no matter what you do. Scrambling for my mother’s approval and failing is such a constant in my life I almost can’t imagine there’s another way.
I tap my finger to the screen as if I’m touching his face. “Your parents love you,” I tell him. “And I’m sure they’re proud of you. Maybe it’s just that your dad and Josh are both doctors, so they have something in common.”
For a moment, Six’s eyes are so bleak it breaks my heart. For all his bluster, I’ve seen this lost boy in him—the one who wishes his father cared—more than once. “He doesn’t even try with me, though.”
Until his father comes around, nothing is enough for him. And trying to prove yourself to someone who’s written you off is like trying to prove an algebraic equation using geometry—it’s never going to work no matter how much effort you expend.
I want to solve it, for both of us. But I also wonder if he doesn’t need someone a little more complete, a little less damaged, to fix it. I wonder if I don’t need that too.
13
JOSH
January 25th
“I like running here,” Drew says the next morning, once she’s done gasping for breath outside the hotel entrance. The gasping no longer amuses me, now that I know about the asthma. Slowly, she stands up and we walk, side by side, toward the pool. “I’m gonna miss it when we leave.”
I like it too. These early mornings with her, which I resented so much at first, are now my favorite part of the trip. And honestly, after experiencing dinner without her last night, I’m wondering just how unbearable this entire vacation would be if she hadn’t come.
We all felt the difference. Without her, my mother’s attempts to remain buoyant never quite succeeded. The strain between Sloane and me was palpable, as was the strain between my dad and me, and I’m not sure what’s worse—my mother’s endless attempts to pretend things are fine, or my father’s failure to pretend anything at all.
“You can still run on the other islands,” I reply as we take our seats by the pool. “I don’t think there are laws against it.”
She kicks my leg. “Yes, I’m aware that no one has outlawed running on the other islands. I just meant I like the scenery here. I like seeing the moon over the water, the palm trees, the surfers heading out to certain death.”
I laugh and rise from the chair to find a waitress for the towels and cappuccino Drew will need any moment now. I wish to God she’d stop taking off her bra when I walk away, however, because even with it on, I can see way more of her anatomy than is good for me—the soft curve of her breasts, tight nipples reacting to the cold. I picture leaning over, tugging on one through the fabric, before I can stop myself.
This has to stop. I honestly don’t know who the fuck I am around her at times. I think about amputations all the way to the towel bin, trying to rein myself in.
When I return, the bra is off and if I look, there won’t be enough gruesome amputations in the world to keep my dick in place. I focus on her face instead, noting the tiniest scar on the bridge of her nose. “How’d you get that?” I ask, tapping my own nose. I’m only mildly curious about the answer until I discover she doesn’t plan to provide it.
“Cage match,” she says. Her smile is wide, as fake as her hair color. It’s as if she’s pulling a curtain shut before my eyes. “I won.”
Messy, I hear Sloane saying, but I suspect the messy part is me. Every time Drew closes herself off to me, I just want to pry further, to dig past all her secrets until I get to the small piece at the center of her that’s never been hurt.
“This view will be impossible to beat,” she says, changing the topic and looking out toward Diamond Head, its edges now a bright, brilliant orange.
“The other islands might be even better,” I tell her. “You never know.”
“Listen to you, being all optimistic,” she says, accepting a cappuccino from the waitress with a grateful smile. “Maybe there’s a bit of your mother in you after all.”
My eyes fall closed. “I hope there’s more than a bit.”
“You and your dad seem to get along,” she argues. “Like, every time we’re together it’s only you he’s talking to.”
Yes. Talking to me about reimbursement, billing, how irritating it is that people can’t pay his cost out-of-pocket. And his business practices aren’t even close to my biggest issue with him.
“If it weren’t for my mother,” I reply, in a moment of unprecedented honesty, “I’d probably never speak to my dad again. Instead, I just moved halfway across the world to prove I would never be like him.”
Her teeth tug at her lip. “Haven’t you proven it yet?” she asks. “Couldn’t you…come home now?”
There’s something tentative in her voice, something simultaneously hopeful and worried. I like it, and know I need to crush it at the same time. “That’s a very far way off,” I tell her. “The camp I run had some issues last summer. We’re so severely understaffed, I can’t imagine a time when we won’t be.”
I’m crushing that hope for both of us. Because there’s a piece of me that wishes I could finally say Yes, I’m going to come home soon, and I need to remember how impossible it is. My father got into medicine t
o make a lot of money and the patients were secondary at best. I want to be a different kind of doctor, a different kind of man, and abandoning thousands of helpless people would be the opposite of that.
When the sun is fully out and our cappuccinos are gone, we rise and begin walking toward our wing of the hotel. Her gaze flickers to the white dress in the store window the way it always does.
“I don’t know if I’m coming with you guys to Lanai,” she says, just as we step onto the elevator. “If Six doesn’t make it, I can’t keep being the fifth wheel on your family vacation.”
My stomach tightens. She’s misunderstood something vital about this trip, about our family dynamic right now. Mostly, I think I just don’t want her to go.
The elevator arrives at our floor and we walk down the hall together. She opens her door.
“Hey, Drew?” I say. She looks over at me. “Just so you know, you’re not the fifth wheel, right now. You’re the glue.”
I open the door and slip quietly into my room, feeling as if I said too much. Because I’m not sure if she’s really holding all of us together, or just me.
14
DREW
Once upon a time I thought fame would insulate me from criticism. I thought it would get me to a place where I no longer answered to anyone. But an all-caps text from Davis over breakfast saying CALL ME IMMEDIATELY is enough to make my stomach lock up, proving it hasn’t happened.
If I weren’t still floating from what Josh said to me this morning, I’d be in a raw panic. Instead, I think You’re not the fifth wheel. You’re the glue. And then I smile and continue to eat, waiting until I’m back in the room to call Davis—a bit of petty defiance I enjoy far too much.
I slide the balcony door open as I wait for him to answer. You’re not the fifth wheel. You’re the glue. It’s the first time in a decade someone has suggested I’m not the source of all their problems. That I am inexplicably the thing holding people together. I want to bathe in those words of his. I want to tattoo them on my chest and keep them with me forever. I know it won’t last, but I like what I see when I look through Josh’s eyes. It almost makes me want to leave while I’m ahead, before I disappoint him.
And disappointment seems inevitable. I’m still me, after all.
Even Davis’s breathing is angry when he answers. “The pictures of you drunk yesterday are everywhere,” he seethes.
“Um…What?” I ask. I was prepared for any number of valid criticisms because God knows I make a lot of mistakes. This one has thrown me for a loop.
“I’m not sure how I can make it clearer,” he says between his teeth. “You were drunk.” Being accused of something I didn’t do makes me feel like I’m a kid again, takes me straight back to those days when my stepbrother would accuse me of something with so much certainty I’d start to wonder if he was right. Davis and my stepbrother have a lot in common, and they’re both capable of making me feel like shit even when I’m completely innocent.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I reply. “I didn’t even go out last night.”
“I guess it was your identical twin, then, who had to be held up getting out of the ocean yesterday,” he says snidely.
My stomach drops—I should be used to people stealing every moment of mine as if it belongs to them, and I should be used to hearing the narrative twisted, but there are times, like right now, when it feels like nothing could possibly be worth it. “I was surfing and I nearly drowned, Davis. I wasn’t drunk.”
“Well, I’m in the middle of booking your apology press tour,” he continues, “and you need to watch how things look. The last fucking thing I need right now is you out acting like you aren’t even sorry.”
“First of all, apology tour? To whom do I even owe an apology?”
“All the teenage fans who just watched their role model plunge off a stage? All the ticket holders in Paris and Berlin who didn’t get to see you perform? All the parents who supported their teen daughters’ obsession with you, only to have you wind up as the before picture for the Betty Ford clinic? Do I need to go on, or have I made my point?”
“I wasn’t drunk, and you know it.”
“I don’t care what you were,” Davis says. “If I’m trying to fix this for you, the least you can do, the absolute bare minimum, is not start more fires I will have to put out.”
I stare at Diamond Head, and think once more of escape. Perhaps Davis needs a little reminder that he’s not the one of us who’s vital to the operation.
“Maybe I should just go live off the land,” I tell him. “Quit while I’m ahead.”
“You just made an ass of yourself in public,” he replies, missing the threat or ignoring it. “I’d hardly say you’re ahead.”
I hang up and slide the screen door open only to find Josh sitting outside. He glances at me with his lips pinched tight, guilty and worried at once. “You just heard all that, didn’t you?” I ask.
He shrugs. “It was hard to miss. You’re extremely loud.”
I sink into the chair on my side of the balcony. “Of course I am,” I mutter. I’m too tired to fight on my own behalf anymore.
It’s silent for a moment before he turns toward me. “Why do you let him talk to you like that?” He sounds pissed and also appalled, reminding me just how bad it must seem to someone on the outside, someone not accustomed to it.
I shield my eyes from the sun to look over at him. “Well, he’s under contract, first of all. I’d have to pay out the ass to get rid of him, and he hired everyone else who works for me, so untangling it would be a mess.” Saying this out loud makes my situation seem even more hopeless.
“Except you weren’t drunk,” he says. “When you fell. It was a panic attack, right? So why are you allowing him and everyone else to act like you’re a problem?”
I hitch a shoulder in lieu of answering. I don’t mind that he knows, but the whole thing is embarrassing. “I’d rather let everyone think I’m a drunk than a complete nutcase. At least drunks can be cured.”
“Having panic attacks doesn’t make you a nutcase,” he says. “There are worse ways to cope with stress. And, by the way, I’m really curious to hear what you think the expression live off the land means. Because I doubt there are hot stone massages or mai tais.”
“Stones are from the land and I could build a fire to heat them,” I reply with a grin. “Stop killing my dream in its infancy. To clarify, though, I’m not talking some kind of Castaway scenario where a volleyball is my only friend. I’d rely on my money a little.”
He raises a brow. “While living off the land. Land like…this? A nice hotel with room service?”
“It’s on land, isn’t it?” I ask, grinning.
He laughs, his blue eyes bright and completely free of contempt, his smile wide and almost affectionate. I wonder what he’d do if I woke him at four AM, telling him my world is falling apart. I’m not sure anyone can make it better, but I suspect he’d really do his best.
At ten-thirty, I meet the Baileys down at the valet stand to ride to Diamond Head. Jim has rented an oversized Jeep that manages to fit all of us, but that’s pretty much the only part of the trip that goes according to plan.
At the convenience store, we are mobbed by teenage girls wanting autographs. Josh winds up pulling me out, barreling through the crowd like a lineman. We get to Diamond Head, which—disappointingly—is not a dormant volcano, but a volcanic crater, meaning there’s not even a chance it will explode. And we haven’t even started to head up the path before I’m posing for pics and signing things again, listening patiently while one chick lists the songs on my last album she didn’t care for.
“Your face looks thinner on camera,” someone else says. “Is it contour? Or are they using Photoshop?”
“Can we go?” barks Josh, stepping between us. He successfully separates me from the crowd, and shepherds me up the trail away from them before walking ahead with Sloane.
I’m in back with Beth, who’s moving slow
ly, while Jim trails behind us, slower still, when I see a group of teens coming down the trail, and feel that too-familiar panic in my chest. At the entrance, I could still escape. But up on that trail, which is about to narrow, anything can go wrong. Sweat dots my brow, slides between my shoulder blades.
“I can’t,” I whisper.
I can’t handle being surrounded, not being able to get away. I can’t handle having a panic attack with everyone watching.
Beth stops. “What’s wrong?”
“I can’t deal with this,” I whisper. “Finish the hike, okay? I’ll be fine. I’m just going to meet you at the hotel.”
And then I race back down the trail, past the entrance, and keep going until I finally find myself on some street where I don’t see a single person, thank God.
I can’t keep living like this, I think.
It’s exactly the thought I had that night in Amsterdam, except there it felt paralyzing and right now it just seems…freeing. I pull out my phone and call my assistant’s number. “Ashleigh,” I tell her, “I need a haircut and color in Waikiki.”
She pauses. “Have you talked to Davis?” she finally asks. “He probably has a certain look he wants for the apology tour.”
The apology tour. I still can’t believe they’re calling it that.
“Which one of us pays you, Ashleigh?” I ask. “And who does my hair belong to?”
“You,” she says sullenly. “Fine. When do you want to do it?”
“Now,” I reply. “Right the fuck now.”
15
JOSH
Those photos of Drew and me walking out of the water are suddenly everywhere, it would seem.
Every five minutes I’m getting a text from a buddy in med school. It’s amazing just how many of my friends have made precisely the same joke, some version of Life in Somalia looks a lot better than I realized. My colleagues back in Somalia write to say I see you’re making the most of your time away, or You’re never coming back, clearly, and I can’t blame you.
The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea Page 6