I laugh. “That would be a really short tour.”
She flops down on a big bed, soft pillow, her hair splayed out around her. “How was your trip?”
I decide not to mention the bombed-out hotel we passed on the way, a hotel I once stayed in, or the illegal road block we encountered. “Uneventful,” I reply. “But I missed the sunset happy hour.”
“Did everything run smoothly without you?” she asks.
I sink into the chair next to my desk. “Not really. Some supplies were stolen. It’s a problem.” I don’t mention that there was also a bomb threat, or that whoever took most of our pain medication from the supply closet must still have a key and it will take another week to get a replacement lock.
“It really doesn’t sound safe there,” she says. Her top teeth worry her bottom lip.
She doesn’t know the half of it. The situation has gone dangerously awry over the past year. But it’s not the danger that has me thinking of leaving, and it’s not my mom’s illness. It’s her. It’s the thought of her moving on without me, when I wouldn’t have anything to offer her even if I was there.
I can’t believe I’d consider abandoning people who need me for a woman I can’t even admit I’m dating.
It sounds exactly like something my father would do.
40
DREW
I somehow manage to complete two more weeks in Europe. Talking to Josh is the highlight of every day, the one part that makes me feel like there’s a point to all this, though I’m not sure what that point would be. Growing close to someone was never on my bucket list. Nor was growing close to someone I’d have to keep a permanent secret.
I call him late in the evening after my show is over. It’s the only easy time for both of us to talk. When he answers, it hits me right in the center of my chest how much I miss his beautiful, tired face. He is lying on what appears to be a cot—he wasn’t exaggerating about the conditions there. I climb into bed and turn out the lights, just so it feels like we’re there together.
"Where are you now?” he asks.
I actually have to think for a moment, glancing out the window to get my bearings. “Rome. Have you been?”
His eyes close. He looks exhausted. “Long time ago. Summer after I graduated.”
“You should be here,” I tell him. “We could go down to Sorrento and drink limoncello and shop.”
His eyes close again, but he smiles. “Drew, if I flew to Rome, we would not be leaving the hotel room.”
Heat flares to life at the idea of it. An entire weekend with him in this very bed, not leaving once. I can't imagine anything better. And it makes me almost bitter that other people get so much and we have so little. How long will he be willing to be my long-distance buddy before he finds someone there to take my place? If he hasn't already.
"Get on a plane," I tell him. It’s phrased like a joke, but if I thought I could persuade him I’d be begging right now.
His eyes brush over my face. "I miss you," he says. “It’s never been as hard to be back here as it is this time.”
It’s more than he’s ever said, and I don’t say it back but I feel guilty when I hang up the phone, as if I should have. Why is he the only one who ever puts himself out there? I can name a hundred things he’s done for me since we met, but can I name one thing I’ve done for him? At a certain point, it looks less like caution and more like selfishness.
I take a deep breath. Those dreams about the bus ride, they’ve been happening again ever since he started getting past my walls. I think maybe they’ve been preparing me for this moment. I know what I have to do, and it terrifies me.
I have to say yes to the unknown.
I’m going to Somalia.
“No, you’re not,” says Jonathan.
He is Tali’s best friend, Hayes’s assistant, and the one person who can figure out how to get me a visa. I should have known he wouldn’t make it easy. I love him, but he was a constant thorn in my side when we were planning Tali’s bachelorette party. I still think the private island off the coast of Dubai would have been way more fun than Vegas.
I wander to the window of my hotel room and pull back the curtains with one hand, holding the phone with the other. In the distance, Zurich’s snow-capped mountains gleam, reflecting the bright sunlight. A river winds lazily just beyond the window. If he could see my view, he’d really wonder why I’m so eager to leave. He’d probably suggest I go to Vegas instead.
“Somalia is deadly,” he says. “People don’t get into Somalia.”
“Sure they do,” I argue. Josh left and returned without a problem, and I’ve been in way too many nice, uneventful places deemed dangerous to take warnings too seriously. “There are embassies and tons of aid organizations traveling in and out. If they can manage, surely a woman with the money to buy the world’s best transportation can.”
“Drew,” he says with a sigh, “do you know anything about Somalia? You’d need to hire multiple armed guards just to get you anywhere in the city. And you might not even be safe then. If you want to earn yourself some good PR, there are easier places to go.”
I’m embarrassed to admit I’m going there for a guy, but I’m not sure Jonathan will help me if I don’t admit it. “I have a friend there,” I tell him. “Someone I’ve been seeing.”
He laughs. “It’s kind of cute…I wondered what you’d be like when you fell in love and now I know.”
“I never said I was in love with the guy.”
“Drew, honey,” he says, “you’re flying to Somalia to see him. I’m pretty sure that’s love. Or you’re insane.”
I’m way more comfortable with the idea of being insane.
In early March, I return to New York to film a cameo on a sitcom I don’t especially like. Davis and Stephanie claim it will raise my profile. I suspect they’re more concerned with raising their own.
When the first day of shooting is over, I sneak off set while Davis is trying to get people to go out to dinner. From there I take a cab to the Ritz Carlton where Ben Tate is waiting in a private room with another associate from his firm.
It took me a while last summer to persuade Tali that Ben and I were never going to happen because tall, hot guys in suits didn’t do it for me. Little did I know.
And Ben is hot, that part is non-negotiable. I just only seem interested in wildly unavailable doctors at this exact moment.
He shakes my hand and introduces me to his associate, Amelia. We make some small talk about Hayes and Tali and the baby, and then his hands steeple atop his notepad.
“So,” he says, “I understand you want to break up with some people.”
I nod. My heart is racing and I press a hand to my chest, waiting to feel air slip in and out of my throat. “I’m terrified,” I admit.
My phone buzzes on the table. Davis is calling me. “Do you need to get that?” Ben asks.
I shake my head. “Do you know how crazy this situation is right now?” I ask them quietly. “I don’t even know if he’s traced my whereabouts. There’s literally nothing in my life he doesn’t know more about than I do. He arranged this phone purchase. He hired my publicist and my accountant and my assistant and they all answer to him. I keep picturing that door opening and him walking in.”
Ben leans back in his chair and shrugs off his jacket. “Then before we do anything else,” he says, “maybe you ought to turn the phone off, just in case.”
I’d worried that I sounded paranoid. Now I wonder if I was paranoid enough.
Ben and Amelia ask questions and take copious notes. They’re so incredibly assured and thorough that I begin to hope they can actually get me out of this mess. But Ben says he needs to see my contracts and all that hope whistles straight back out of me.
Every contract is in the possession of Davis or other people Davis hired. I know of no way to get Ben a thing without alerting them all.
I tell them this, feeling like an idiot. “I was twenty when I got signed,” I explain, “and I was
dead broke. I was just thrilled someone was willing to take charge and handle all the details, and anytime I need something, Davis has always just offered to take care of it.”
“Yeah,” Ben says. “I bet he did.” I hear in his sigh the words he kept to himself. Of course he offered to take care of it—he wanted to make sure no one was checking up on him. For a girl who insists she can’t lean on anyone, it strikes me that I allowed myself to just lie flat where Davis is concerned.
“As far as those contracts go,” he continues, “how do you feel about pretending to buy a house?”
I laugh. “What?”
“You’re going to decide to buy a house. An amazing, very expensive house somewhere in LA.” He turns to Amelia and she nods and pulls out her phone, already researching. “And I’m going to approach your accountant and whoever else for copies of those contracts, because obviously any bank would want to see them before they give you a loan.”
Amelia holds up her phone. “This one’s nice,” she says, showing us a twenty-two-million-dollar mansion with multiple pools overlooking the lights of the city.
I laugh. “I live in a one-bedroom right now. That’s quite the upgrade.”
Ben’s smile is brief. “Great. But I’ve got to warn you—there’s a strong possibility he’s been mismanaging things.”
My stomach sinks. “Mismanaging them…how?”
He frowns. “Drew, even decent people are seduced by power, by someone else’s money. Even decent people rationalize skimming off the top. And Davis doesn’t sound like he was ever a decent person.”
“So you think he’s been taking my money,” I whisper. I’m sure I sound impossibly naïve to him right now, since I’ve clearly painted Davis as an asshole. But there’s a vast divide between an asshole and a thief.
“I’d stake my life on the fact that he’s been taking your money,” he says. “It’s just a matter of how much money, and how many other people have been helping themselves alongside him. He’s gone to great lengths to keep you out of the loop, and there’s probably a reason for it.”
“Are you really going to be able to figure all this out, though?” I ask, feeling winded. Sure, I have money. I have a lot of money. But most of my revenue from the last tour and the most recent album is still “out there” somewhere, theoretically being held until venues and the crew and a thousand other entities have gotten their cut. I wouldn’t know where to begin trying to separate out the truth from the excuses.
“With some help, yes,” he says. I like that he’s so sure of himself—one of us needs to be. “But if my suspicions are correct, he’s going to fight you tooth and nail to hang on to control, and you’re really going to need a backbone when it happens. He’s going to try to convince you to let him handle everything with the house, and he’ll go out of his way to make you back down.”
I want Ben to be wrong about all this, but what he’s describing sounds exactly like what Davis has done all along.
“Why the fuck are you buying a twenty-two-million-dollar house?” Davis demands when I arrive on set the next day.
I shouldn’t be surprised but somehow I am. Ben contacted my accountant, and my accountant ran straight to Davis. That, to me, is the first nail in the coffin for them both.
“Why shouldn’t I?” I reply. “I can afford it, right?”
I see the way frustration twists inside him. There’s a momentary flare of his nostrils, a curl of his lip. “You’re famous,” he says after a second’s pause. “You don’t need to go through a bank for a loan like you’re Bob and Betty Sue of Buttfuck, Nowhere, hoping to qualify for a new condo. We’ve got people who can take care of all that for you.”
“I don’t want it taken care of for me, though,” I tell him. “I’m twenty-six and buying my first place. I want to do it myself like any other adult would.”
“Normal adults do things themselves. The benefit of being a celebrity is that you don’t have to. I need you focused on your job—you know, the one you haven’t exactly been crushing of late.”
My chest is growing tighter and tighter the longer this conversation goes on. Exactly how much does he have to hide?
“Except I’ve already handled it,” I reply. “You’re the one wasting my time arguing. And why would my accountant be calling you?”
He’s flustered then. I’m sure he anticipated I’d hand this over as readily as I have everything else. “He was just concerned. He didn’t understand why you’d be dealing with a stranger for all this.”
“Everyone I deal with is a stranger,” I reply.
He sighs heavily, as if I’m being childish. “A stranger to me. You should only be going with people I’ve vetted. I’ll find you someone else.”
“No,” I reply. “Just tell the firm to give Ben whatever he needs.”
“I’m very uncomfortable with bringing in outsiders,” he says.
Yes, I think. I bet you are.
Beth and I chat on the phone the day after my meeting with Ben. I don’t reference her cancer, since I’m not supposed to know, but I do ask how she’s doing and she dismisses the question, wanting instead to know how I am. I stammer through a conversation about the tour, about the sitcom I’m filming. It’s hard when the most exciting thing in my life—the only exciting thing in my life—is my relationship with her son.
We make plans to get together when I’m back in LA, which is when she asks if I’m going to see my mother before I leave.
I blink in surprise. Beth and I have never really discussed my family before. “I hadn’t planned on it,” I reply, gazing at Central Park through the hotel room window. It’s March, but still fully winter here. There are lots of things about New York I don’t miss, and the weather is high on the list—but not first. “We don’t really get along all that well.”
“How could any mother not get along with you?” she asks. “You’re an angel.”
My throat swells. Obviously, I have to take what Beth says with a grain of salt—she’d say the same of Six, I’m sure—but the simple fact that she still likes me, even after I broke up with her son, feels like a gift I can never repay. “I’m not really an angel,” I say quietly. “I’m frequently kind of a jerk.”
She tsks. “I can’t see that. But even if it’s true, I’ll bet you have your reasons. And I bet your mom has her reasons too, and they probably don’t have much to do with you at all. Give her a chance, honey.”
I smile and tear up at the same time. Beth is trying to fix her boys’ lives before she dies. And I get the sense she’s trying to fix mine too.
“Life isn’t black and white, Drew,” she says. “And you have to learn to live in the gray a little, accept that it can be perfect in all its imperfections.”
Because she asks me to do it—and only because of that—I meet my mother for lunch the day before I return to Europe to finish the tour.
She’s already waiting at the restaurant when I arrive.
Sometimes when I see her on a week day—her hair pulled back in a neat bun, clad in her annoyingly corporate attire—it’s hard to picture the woman my father fell in love with. Today though, I catch a glimpse of her in an unguarded moment, before she’s seen me, and there’s something wistful in her expression, something that’s gone unfulfilled—and I find the woman I remember once more. The mother of my early childhood, who made forts out of pillows and blankets with me and laughed as my father sang ridiculous songs in Russian. Before she ruined it all.
I move toward the table. She smiles and stiffens, simultaneously, as if I make her happy and she’s bracing for me to take that happiness away at the same time.
“I like your hair,” she says.
Of course she does. I could walk into her law firm now as a junior associate and no one would blink an eye. The teenage rebel in me wants me to go to the bathroom and shave it off, pronto.
“Thanks,” I say grimly, taking the seat across from hers.
“And you’re sober,” she says.
“Tell me someth
ing, Mom,” I reply, looking over the menu, “are we always going to throw our worst moments in each other’s faces? Because you’re not cheating on my father right now either, but I managed not to bring it up.”
I look at her just in time to watch a wealth of emotions pass over her face. Shock, anger, sadness, resignation.
“You’re right,” she says for the first time in her life. “I’m sorry.”
The waitress asks in a hushed voice if we’d prefer still or sparkling water. I say one and my mother says the other. We cannot even agree about water, apparently.
“How was Hawaii?” she asks once we’re alone again.
Already the trip has become a blur in my head, a few images, a snippet of conversation left to represent hours and days and weeks. Mostly, it’s now just an overall feeling of warmth, and hope, of being made new. “It was really good.” I suppose I should ask about Steven, or my asshole step-sibling, or her job, but I don’t give a shit about any of them. I give negative shits about them. And I’m so sick of doing things just to be polite or because someone expects it of me.
“They’re saying in the news that you broke up with that guitarist.”
I don’t want to tell her the truth because she hated Six the one time they met and it would thrill her. That I’ve fallen for a doctor would thrill her even more. One of many reasons she’ll never know. I sigh. “Yes.”
“Good,” she says. “I never liked him.”
“Really, Mom?” I ask with a bitter laugh. “Gosh, you were so subtle about it.”
She frowns. “He has a drinking problem,” she says. “You understand why I wouldn’t want that for you.”
“Because they’re so hard to be faithful to?” I ask. It’s a low blow, even from me.
Her mouth pinches. “I thought we weren’t going to throw things in each other’s faces?” she asks.
The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea Page 21