All Eyes on Her

by Poonam Sharma

  “That is insane,” Josh said from the hall where he had overheard the entire story.

  “Hey, what’s all the commotion?” Sheila trailed behind him, and then stopped midstride as if one shoe had been glued to the floor. “Oh my God! Lydia Johnson! Oh my God! Monica! Lydia Johnson is in your dining room! Oh my God, what are you doing here?”

  “Hiding from people like you,” Jonathan answered for her.

  “What do you want me to do, Lydia?” I asked. “I still don’t understand why you’re here.”

  “I needed to hide, so the paparazzi wouldn’t figure out it’s me. They never got so close before. We need them to believe it’s still some ‘unidentified starlet.’ So I think I’m staying here for the night because the damn photographers are going crazy trying to find out who Cam’s mystery woman is, so they’ll probably be camped out on the lawn all night waiting for me to come out.”

  “I think I’m gonna pass out,” Sheila told Josh, who just shushed her, before returning his attention to us.

  “So you just want to stay here?” I asked Lydia, who had removed her fake eyelashes and deposited them beside the sugar bowl, making it look like a daddy-long-legs was about to crawl its way in.

  “Basically.” She sniffed, and then leaned toward Alex, eyeing his cake. “Hey, that looks good. Are you gonna eat that?”

  “Monica—” Sheila began with a huff, before I cut her off.

  “Lydia, you can’t honestly expect to barge into my house and take over. This is out of control, even for you.”

  “Monica,” Josh tried again.

  “I’m sorry.” She raised her eyebrows and her voice, through a mouthful of Alex’s cake and with a glance toward Sheila. “But it’s not like your friends are disappointed that I’m here. I mean, this chick is about to have a coronary.”

  “Monica!” Sheila howled.

  “What?” I swung in her direction.

  “I’m not having a coronary…phew, phew, phew…I think I’m having the baby!”

  “You’re what?” Jonathan leapt off his chair as if Sheila were about to blow chunks all over his brand-new tailored suit.

  “Don’t be a jerk, Jonathan,” Cassie said, kneeling by Sheila’s side. “Honey, are you sure?”

  “Her heartbeat is getting too rapid,” Josh said, checking his wristwatch against her pulse. “I need to get her to the hospital, now.”

  “Monicaaa!” Sheila reached for my arm, and pulled me to her. “You have to come with me!”

  “Of course I will. Of course! Let me, umm…let me get my keys.”

  “No! Don’t let go of my hand,” Sheila squealed.

  “I’ll drive so you can stay in the backseat and hold her hand,” Alex volunteered.

  “I’ll come, too,” Luke blurted out. “So…so I can help you carry her to the car quicker!”

  “You can’t leave me here alone,” Lydia interjected.

  “Well then you’ll have to come with us,” I snapped.

  “But I already took off my disguise!” Lydia freaked out. “The paparazzi will know it’s me!”

  “I don’t give a damn about that right now, Lydia!” I shouted.

  “I’m calling 911,” Jonathan announced frantically. “I’m calling 911!”

  “Get a hold of yourself!” Cassie slapped him across the face. “You’re useless in an emergency…useless!”

  “Actually, he should call 911, since we can’t fit that many people in Monica’s car,” Josh said, grabbing Sheila’s purse and coat from the closet.

  “Are you hyperventilating?” Cassie asked Jonathan.

  “Oooh!” Sheila moaned.

  “I can’t get into a car without tinted windows looking like this, Monica. I can’t even go from the building to the car without a disguise unless I want the paparazzi getting pictures,” Lydia pressed. “They always hide out in the garages…It’ll be the end of my career if they find out I was the mystery woman!”

  “Wait a minute,” Alex said, his eyes alight. “Do you still have all those Indian clothes in your closet? I have an idea.”

  “I feel so exotic,” Lydia remarked about ten minutes later, as we sprinted across the front lawn and into the waiting ambulance.

  She didn’t exactly look natural swathed in the red chiffon lehnga I had picked up in New Delhi on my last visit to the homeland, but at least the traditional head scarf was ample enough to cover her face.

  “Just don’t get it dirty!” I yelled, gathering up the skirts of my own Sari to avoid tripping over it as the paramedics yanked us into the back of the ambulance, one by one. Of course, Lydia insisted that both Cassie and I also change into traditional garb and cover our faces to further confuse the score of photographers who’d leapt into action the second they saw the ambulance pull up. The only female face they could actually see, in fact, was Sheila’s, contorted with a mixture of anguish, fear and pride while being carried out in Luke’s arms.

  But don’t feel so sorry for her. After all, the birth of her first child was about to be commemorated in tacky magazines and tabloid TV shows across Southern California. If it weren’t for the pain, that night would have been the high point of her life.

  “I’m a doctor,” Josh announced to the paramedics, grabbing their CB radio and proceeding to spew a torrent of directions at the hospital staff on the other end of the line.

  “Wait for us!” Cassie shoved Jonathan in behind me before hoisting herself in.

  Alex jumped in last, pulling the doors shut. “Go!”

  “You’ll be all right,” I cooed, and smoothed the sweat off Sheila’s brow. “Everything’s gonna be fine.”

  “It’s never a dull moment with you, is it?” Luke asked from his spot to my left, as the siren roared to life and the ambulance leapt into traffic.

  “This is Doctor Joshua Weiss, from the UCLA Medical Center E.R. My wife is in labor and we’re on our way to Cedars Sinai. I’ll need a stretcher waiting outside, and an epidural ready to go!” he barked over the radio. “Over!”

  “That’s great, man.” Alex leaned in from the other side of me, steadying himself as we were jerked left and right. “This is the perfect time to make your move. Actors…”

  “What is your problem?” Luke grew incensed.

  “Shut up! Shut up, everyone!” Sheila clutched my hand so tightly it might actually have burst.

  “Do you have an inhaler in this thing?” Cassie grabbed a terrified paramedic by the collar, motioning toward a wheezing Jonathan. “I think he might pass out.”

  “Just try to breathe, baby.” Josh returned the attention to his wife. “Remember the breathing from Lamaze? Hee-hee-hee-hoo.”

  “You!” She unleashed a voice reminiscent of Poltergeist. “Get your hands off of me. So help me God I will stab you in your sleep if you ever try to touch me again!”

  “Okay, honey.” He nodded, stroking her hand. “That’s fine. Whatever you say, I know it’s the pain talking.”

  “Shut up!”

  Clearly rattled, he looked helplessly at me from across her belly.

  “Hey, what did you get her as a push present?” Lydia whispered into his ear, thinking that somehow in this five-foot-by-five-foot space, the rest of us wouldn’t hear.

  “She’s dilated too far,” the paramedic between Sheila’s legs announced before Josh could venture an answer. “We’re gonna have to get this baby out now.”

  “Wait! Let me do it!” Josh tried to climb across Lydia to the other side of his wife.

  “No,” the paramedic told him and held him back by a shoulder. “With all due respect, Doctor Weiss, you work from the neck up, and let me deal with the rest.”

  “Wait, what?” I said. “You mean now? You mean you’re gonna deliver the baby here?”

  “We won’t make it to the hospital in time, ma’am,” the paramedic explained. “So I’m gonna need two of you to get down here and grab a hold of her legs so that she can push.”

  “Lydia—” I swallowed after a pause “—it looks like it’
s you and me.”

  “Me?” Lydia was like a deer caught in the headlights. “Why me?”

  “Josh has to stay up there, Cassie’s trying to revive Jonathan and I’m pretty sure that my cousin doesn’t want my ex-boyfriend or my fling from last weekend getting that familiar with her…you know…parts!” I explained while climbing across Luke’s lap to get to Sheila’s left leg.

  “My parts?” Sheila questioned Josh rhetorically.

  “Your fling?” Alex asked territorially, as if he could possibly have still known me well enough after all these years to judge or be shocked by my behavior. “You had a fling already? In the one week that you’ve been single?”

  “Your fling?” Luke repeated, his self-defense instinct kicking in. “Is that what you’re telling yourself?”

  I had had enough.

  “Just get over here!” I ordered, and Lydia reluctantly complied, lifting Sheila’s right foot up against her shoulder and hunkering down.

  “Now, Sheila.” The paramedic eyed us all into silence. “On the count of three, I’m gonna need you to push with everything you’ve got….”

  I leaned my shoulder into Sheila’s other foot, shot a steadying glance at Josh, and then nodded at the paramedic, thinking: May God, Vishnu and Adonai have mercy on us all.

  “Would you like to do the honors?” The paramedic waved a stainless steel clamp in Josh’s direction, as we pulled into the driveway of Cedars Sinai about thirty minutes later.

  Tearfully, he reached over and snipped off the cord.

  “I can’t believe I have a daughter.” He kissed every one of his wife’s white-knuckled fingers. “I’m somebody’s dad.”

  “Asha,” Sheila whispered. “Asha Weiss.”

  “Okay,” the paramedic said, wrapping the baby up in a blanket before the back doors flew open. “Let’s get Mom and her new baby inside that hospital.”

  “That was amazing,” Cassie said, and then hopped out into the throng of waiting paparazzi.

  “No,” Jonathan said to me before jumping out after her. “She’s amazing. Did you see the way Cassie took care of me? Where can you find a woman like that?”

  Lydia ran right past the paparazzi and into the hospital, bolting alongside the stretcher conveying Sheila, followed closely behind by Cassie and Jonathan. Disappointed to realize that nobody besides Alex, Luke and myself remained inside our clown-car of an ambulance, the paparazzi quickly dispersed.

  It looked as if the both of them were getting ready to speak at once, so I held up a hand to silence them. There really was nothing they could tell me that I didn’t already know. And there was nothing I needed to hear. They weren’t really competing over me that night any more than I had been competing with that redhead at The Skybar for Luke a week before. Alex hadn’t known me for years by that point, and Luke had never actually known me at all. This was about territory and instinct, pure and simple. I knew it as well as anyone else because I had been just as guilty of that motivation as them. The truth was not just that all women were animals…the truth was that everyone was.

  “No need to say anything, boys,” I told them, shaking my head. “Trust me. I get it.”

  To forgive the animal instinct inside of these men was to admit to the animal inside myself. Survival is more than an instinct; it is an imperative. So maybe it’s not about forgiving or denying our inner ape. It’s about accepting, appreciating and keeping her on a very short leash, and going along with Alex and Luke and even Stefanie when they occasionally failed to secure said leash.

  But I would think more about that later. Right now, I had to drag my knuckles into the hospital and be part of the welcome committee for the newest little gorilla in our pack.

  epilogue

  ASHA THRUST HER TONGUE OUT AT THE BEADED STRAP ON MY shoulder, while her head bobbled from side to side. Sheila and Josh had decided to raise Asha with exposure to both their religions because as Sheila said, Life is confusing anyway. She might as well get used to it. Asha was truly good-natured, even for a one-month-old baby, calm to a fault, probably in direct reaction to her mother’s tendency toward the dramatic. I rocked the baby gently, cradling her head, savoring the idea that I could protect for however short a time.

  “Here come the copter-azzi,” Lydia announced, and gestured above her head at what was previously clear blue sky.

  All two-hundred seated guests shifted their attention from the altar to the skies above the new Camydia Compound in the Pacific Palisades. Cameron and Lydia’s recommitment ceremony came complete with a chartered fleet of limousines shuttling guests to and fro, a split-level platform erected to showcase the smiling couple, and a gospel choir from Lydia’s childhood church, singing out over the bluffs at the Pacific Ocean.

  And even with all that meticulous planning, someone had forgotten to restrict the airspace around the Palisades for long enough to avoid helicopter-photos that were sure to be splashed across most trash magazines the following morning.

  How convenient.

  “Do something about them!” Lydia scolded her security manager. After having thrown her hair back, Lydia perked up and gave the vultures her best look of interrupted romantic devotion. “This is a private expression of our love, damn it!”

  I smirked at Sheila, who took Asha from my arms and handed her over to Joshua.

  “Even I’m not falling for that,” she whispered, before fishing a bottle of formula out of her bag and handing it to her doting husband.

  “You’ve got to say this much for her, though,” I countered. “She plays the paparazzi better than anyone I have ever seen. Her new album is likely to go platinum.”

  “Of course it is. Everybody roots for love,” Cassie interjected, slipping her hand into Jonathan’s. “We can’t help it.”

  I also learned recently that everyone can’t help but root for the underdog. Because the last thing I expected to feel when I opened a letter from Stefanie the day before was hope that she would succeed at the new law firm where she was starting to practice. It was only an announcement, of course, one of a thousand photocopies she had made and probably distributed without thinking to everyone in her Rolodex. I recognized, too, what this could be intended as. I chose, however, to see it as a peace offering. One which I would return with a congratulatory bottle of merlot.

  Maybe after an entire month without any men in my life, I was unfettered enough to see things clearly. If all of the insanity had been rooted in biological competition, then clearly avoiding men completely would render me genius enough to make partner in no time. I smiled to myself, tipping back my glass at the champagne toast.

  And as always, positive energy draws opportunity to a woman in much the same way as heat draws moths to a flame. The moth eyeing me from across the room was fixated, even winking as the bubbles zoomed to my head. I knew I should have ignored him. Snubbed him. At the very least definitely not have winked back.

  But what would be the fun in that?

  ALL EYES ON HER

  A Red Dress Ink novel

  ISBN: 978-1-4268-1351-1

  © 2008 by Poonam Sharma.

  All rights reserved. The reproduction, transmission or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission. For permission please contact Red Dress Ink, Editorial Office, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  Poonam Sharma, All Eyes on Her