No one—not that stupid Phil guy and definitely not Uncle Billy—was happy to see them.
She hadn’t really expected Uncle Billy to be too happy, what with the daddy lie and everything. God, why had she listened to Janice about that? She’d known it was stupid, but Janice had told her that someone would pay her for lying. She’d been freaking out that the Phil guy would check up on her story, but he didn’t seem to care. Like her word was enough.
But he hadn’t given her any money either.
That hundred bucks Uncle Billy gave her burned in her pocket.
And now she and Charlie were going to Billy’s house. Alone. And the dude was totally scary. Really scary. And big. Bigger than he looked on TV. Bigger than Aunt Janice’s boyfriend. And the way he’d destroyed all the furniture on the set? Like the chairs were toys?
He was going to beat the shit out of her. The second they got into his house, he was going to turn around and just whale on her.
So much for that happy-family fantasy she had going.
It was time to come up with a Plan B.
Maybe it was because she was so tired, or because she hadn’t had anything to eat in hours, but Plan B didn’t come.
She picked at her chapped lips with shaking fingers.
“I’m scared,” Charlie whispered.
Yeah, and what do you think I am? she wanted to shout.
Instead, she just took Charlie’s hand. “Let’s have a thumb war,” she whispered.
Things would be better if that woman had gotten in the truck with them. The talk show host woman seemed nice. Way nicer than Uncle Billy, who looked like he couldn’t wait to kill her and Charlie and hide their bodies.
Becky had recognized the talk show host right away. Aunt Janice had shown Becky a whole bunch of pictures of Maddy Baumgarten before putting her on that plane. Aunt Janice had called Maddy a stuck-up bitch. But Aunt Janice called everyone a stuck-up bitch.
Hard to believe that beautiful woman who looked like a picture out of a magazine had been friends with Becky’s mom. Grew up in their shitty neighborhood. Not that Maddy looked that much like the photos Aunt Janice had shown her.
Maddy used to have really curly hair and a big ol’ bubble butt. And her teeth used to be a little funky in front. Not bad, like Amy Winchester’s, but pretty bad.
Must be nice, she thought, to have so much money. To get everything that was wrong with you fixed.
“I’m tired,” Charlie whispered.
“Go to sleep, bud,” she said and within minutes he was slumped sideways against her. She lifted her arm, and put it around him, letting him slide into her lap.
In the front seat, Uncle Billy picked up his cell phone, pressed a button, and held the phone to his ear. Almost immediately she could hear the tinny sound of the person on the other end.
“Victor,” Uncle Billy said. “God. Yes. Stop yelling. I know. Man … I know. What? Everywhere?” Uncle Billy sighed and the tension in the truck rolled down over her, making her feel small. Smaller than she was. Folding her bones in half, squishing her skin, pushing her heart into her stomach, where she felt it pound and pound. “Tomorrow,” Uncle Billy said, still on the phone. “No. My house. Yeah, I know, but it’s gotta be my house. Just say ‘no comment.’ Isn’t that what you’re supposed to say? Okay. Bye.”
Uncle Billy punched the buttons on his phone like he wanted to stab someone.
Again, he lifted the phone to his ear. “Hey, Luc,” he said. “I know. I know. I was there! No.” He laughed a little, a tired sound that made Becky watch him carefully. “I’m fine. They’re … I don’t know … scared. But listen, can you do me a favor? I need some clothes and stuff for the kids.” He glanced at her in his rearview mirror and she stared back, even though she was practically wetting her pants. “You’re thirteen, right?” He asked and she was so stunned he knew that she just nodded. “And the boy is like three. Thanks.”
He hung up and looked at her in the rearview mirror again. She wanted to yell at him to pay attention to the road before he got them all killed in a crash.
“What’s your mom’s phone number?”
“Mom’s?”
“Yeah.”
“Why do you want her number?”
“So I can find out what the hell she was thinking putting her two kids on a plane and sending them to Dallas without telling me!”
He doesn’t know.
Aunt Janice said he knew, but he obviously didn’t.
“She’s dead.”
The big car swerved and Becky grabbed the door handle so she wouldn’t squash Charlie, who put his thumb in his mouth and went back to sleep.
“What?” Uncle Billy asked.
“Mom’s dead.”
“When?” His voice was weird. Scary and thin like he couldn’t talk.
“A few months ago.” Seven months, one week and three days.
“Months? What … What happened?”
“Overdose.”
Uncle Billy was quiet for a long time and Becky’s heart felt like it was going to beat out of her chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Whatever.” She looked out the window and bit her lip until her eyes stopped burning.
“Where’s your dad?”
“I don’t know. Mom never said.”
“And Charlie’s?”
“Jail, I think.”
Outside, the trees were a blur. Inside her heart was a bird flying her far away from here.
“So, you’ve been staying with Janice?” he finally asked.
She nodded and then realized Uncle Billy couldn’t see her. “Yes,” she said, her voice cracking around the word.
“What’s her number?”
“You’re going to send us back?” The thought clanged around her body, hurting her from the inside. This had all been for nothing. Nothing.
She clenched her hands into fists, her nails biting into the skin distracting her from the scream clawing up her throat, filling her mouth.
Did you honestly think something else would happen? she asked herself, pulling Charlie closer. Like he would take one look at you and invite you into his life? Just because he was family? You know better than that.
“I … don’t … It’s your home, isn’t it?” he asked.
Instead of answering such a stupid question, she told him Aunt Janice’s cell number and with one eye on the road he dialed and then lifted the phone to his ear.
After a moment he swore, banging the phone against the steering wheel.
Like Aunt Janice would answer the call, Becky wanted to say.
“Janice, it’s Billy. You’d better call me or I swear to God the next call will be from my lawyer.”
Uncle Billy threw the phone against the passenger window and Becky swallowed a startled shriek.
The car was silent for a moment and then Uncle Billy asked, “How did Janice pay for the tickets?”
“She didn’t.”
“Because the show did?”
That made her laugh. She wasn’t sure what the story was with the Phil guy, but that dude wasn’t paying for shit.
“No.”
“It didn’t?” he asked, glancing at her real quick in the mirror. “Maybe Phil did it on his own.”
Becky didn’t tell him that the money had been hers. Eight hundred dollars she’d saved from babysitting and doing Pauly McCormick’s homework. Every single penny she’d had.
I am so stupid.
But she wasn’t stupid enough to go back. Just because he meant to send them back didn’t mean she would go. No way.
Outside, all the buildings and alleys gave way to streets and grass. Trees. Not just parks, but lawns that looked like parks.
She knew cities—Dallas, Pittsburgh, it didn’t matter. She knew back alleys and fire escapes and Dumpsters. She could find her way around those places.
But out here? In all this open space?
Oh God, she thought. She reached over to roll down the window but there were so many but
tons she changed her mind.
Last year Mrs. Jordal had kept her after class and told her that pretending to be stupid wasn’t going to get her anywhere. Mrs. Jordal had talked to her about college and scholarships and changing her life, and for a few minutes Becky had believed her.
She wondered where the hell Mrs. Jordal was now.
This was the one smart thing she’d done to change her life and it had blown up in her face.
She glanced at Charlie, his face red with sleep. His little eyelashes like feathers on his cheeks.
Her stomach rolled and she gagged.
“Can we pull over?” she asked.
“What?”
“I need … Can we just pull over?”
“I’m on the highway!” Uncle Billy cried.
“You want me to throw up all over your leather seats?”
“Okay, okay. Here. Hold on.” He looked sideways and jerked the truck onto the shoulder. They’d barely rolled to a stop before she threw open the door and puked all over the concrete.
Eight hundred dollars, dragging Charlie thousands of miles, leaving behind everything she knew to take a chance on a guy who hated them. This was supposed to make them safe, she thought, squeezing her eyes shut. And everything just felt more dangerous.
The green room echoed with silence. It pounded with it. Or maybe it was Maddy’s head, she couldn’t tell.
I think I’m having a stroke, she thought.
For about a year after her divorce Maddy had lived in a state of deep freeze. Which was ironic since she’d moved to Miami with her mom.
But after the emotional smackdown of her marriage, the endless confrontations and arguments, the sustained emotional violence of being in love with Billy Wilkins, she’d been wrung out and empty. So for one blissful year she had let herself feel nothing—she’d been totally removed from the sludge of bad news and anxiety and depression.
She didn’t care about Billy. The stories in the gossip magazines. She didn’t care about whomever he was fucking. The divorce. It was all just background noise, echoes heard from far away.
Every night she laid her head down on her pillow and she slept like a baby. And every morning she woke up and, using the money from the divorce settlement, she went to school at the University of Miami and studied broadcast journalism.
There were no friends. No boyfriends. No rebound sex. Nothing. No one got close enough to touch her, close enough to hurt her. No one got close enough that she had to care about them.
All she had to care about was herself. She lost a shit-load of weight, and maybe it was the vaguely distant and emotionless way she related the news, but she was good at it.
And her star began to rise.
Slowly, she’d started to feel things again over the years. Pride. Elation. Disappointment. Now betrayal, thanks to Ruth.
But she had lived in that deep freeze for so long that it had become her natural habitat and sometimes she had to force herself to feel something. To engage on a human level. To not treat the whole world and every person she met like it was a segment she had to get through.
But not right now.
The ice she’d lived in for so long had cracked and split and she felt it all. Every molecule of guilt, every inch of shame and anger and horror at what had happened on her show. On her watch.
Those children, they weren’t Billy’s. She didn’t believe that lie for a moment. They were Denise’s kids, or Janice’s, there was no other explanation.
And her producers were responsible for that ambush.
Ruth’s mic buzzed and she pressed the button on her headpiece. “He’s gone,” she said. “And not coming back. Put on that Jason Aldean special. No, Phil,” Ruth glanced at Maddy, “she’s not going on either. You screwed us all.”
Ruth let go of the headset and stumbled back, one of the overstuffed chairs in the corner catching her as she fell.
“There go our careers,” Ruth said.
“How much did you know?” Madelyn asked, unconcerned about her career. About the Jason Aldean rerun. All of it was a distant second to finding out how big a setup this had been.
Ruth didn’t look at her, just stared up at the ceiling as if she were considering melting into her chair. “Nothing until this morning. Halfway through the first traffic segment I realized something was up.”
“So Phil flew them down here behind your back?”
“No, actually. He’s not that devious. I think Billy’s sister got excited and sent them down here. One-way ticket, mind you. And Phil just capitalized on the situation.”
There were so many problems, so many things wrong that Maddy couldn’t settle on one long enough to form an argument. She was just a long scream of anger.
“You could have told me. You had time.”
Ruth nodded. “I could have. And I could have told Billy and I could have put my foot down. I could have done a dozen other things to protect our show, our integrity, those …” She lifted her glasses, digging at her red-rimmed eyes. It was about the most raw Maddy had ever seen Ruth. “I could have protected those kids.”
“So? Why didn’t you?”
“He was like …” Ruth dropped the glasses and took a deep breath. “Like a cocked gun, and he threatened to fire me if I told Billy or you. And then … then you guys would have been totally unprepared.”
“That little pep talk at commercial? That was you preparing me?”
“It was me doing the best I could without ensuring that you or Billy would walk off the show. The kids were freaked out, dirty. Hungry. Tired. Phil wasn’t even going to clean them up.”
“Is that supposed to make it all right?”
Ruth finally looked directly at her. And Maddy saw that she was a woman diminished, reduced to a puddle in last year’s Anne Klein funeral line.
“I’m sorry,” Ruth said. “For what it’s worth, and I know it can’t be much, but I really am sorry.”
As if they’d conjured him, Phil came around the corner into the green room.
“The studio audience is getting rain checks, but they’re not happy,” he announced and then turned to Maddy. “You should have gone back on.”
“And done what, Phil? Lie some more?”
“I wasn’t lying,” he said, a hand pressed to his chest. “I was doing my job, and doing it pretty fucking well.”
“You can’t be pleased with that show,” Maddy said. “That was a train wreck. We’re all going to get fired because of your stupid—”
Oozing smug satisfaction he held his hands out as if placating a jealous lover. It was hard not to punch him in the throat.
“Now, I’m sorry things played out like that during the show. There wasn’t any way to warn you that would have protected the integrity of the surprise.”
The top of her head felt like it was going to blow off.
“But before you get upset—”
“Get upset? Get?”
“Listen, the numbers are through the roof. Facebook, Twitter, the AM Dallas blog, that segment is all anyone is talking about in the tristate area. The clip of Billy kicking over that chair has gone viral, Madelyn. Viral! Ruth, tell her how great this is.”
Slowly, like an ancient woman, Ruth got to her feet, uncurling vertebrae by sore vertebrae. And when she reached full height, she looked Phil in the eye.
“I quit,” Ruth said.
“What?” Madelyn and Phil asked at the same time.
“I won’t get dragged into your cesspool, Phil.”
“What about the show?” Madelyn asked.
Ruth shrugged. “What about it? For three years we’ve loved this show like some morning it was going to wake up and love us back. Look at us, Maddy. What has our work gotten us?”
Richard stormed into the room, stopped dead center, and pivoted to face all of them, his hands at his hips. His short-sleeved plaid shirt stretched over his middle-aged man paunch. Normally, Richard looked like a mild-mannered high school science teacher. Not now. Now he looked like a man who was
about to fire the lot of them.
“Can one of you explain what the hell just happened?” he asked.
Phil looked up from his phone, smiling like a smug rat. “I think we just became the most talked about morning show—”
“Stop.” Richard held up a hand. “Who planned this?”
Maddy and Ruth pointed at Phil, who suddenly seemed to catch on to the fact that Richard was not pleased.
“I wouldn’t say planned,” he hedged. “It just sort of happened.”
“You flew those kids down here?” Richard asked and Phil shook his head.
“I got a call this morning from Janice Wilkins saying the kids were on the red-eye.”
“And that daddy bullshit?”
“They’re his kids.” Phil glanced at Ruth and Maddy, neither of whom jumped to his aid. “The girl said so.”
“And you didn’t check?”
“Why check, she said he was her father. Why would she lie?”
Oh, Phil, Maddy thought. You lazy lazy bastard.
“Right. Why would anyone lie? One phone call and I got the truth. One fucking phone call and I found out they’re his sister’s kids. Did you pay the girl?”
Phil shook his head, looking green.
“You’re sure? No gifts?”
“Some diapers.”
“You’re fired.”
“What?”
“Out. Immediately.”
“You … you can’t do that.”
“Yes, Phil, I can. And considering the fact that Billy’s lawyers are without a doubt going to land on us with both feet, I am delighted to throw you under that particular bus.”
“But the show didn’t make the accusations, we just provided the forum. That’s … that’s the law, right?”
“You weren’t even sure?” Richard sighed and shook his head. “God save me from fools. I should have fired you when your wife left and you started wearing those stupid T-shirts. Snoopy does not make you look younger, Phil.” Richard was in full attack mode and if Maddy weren’t so terrified that she was going to be next, she’d actually be enjoying this. “All right, let’s pick another reason to fire you from the many many I have. Are you schtupping your subordinate?”
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