by Jane Heller
“You’ve come a long way,” I said as we stood together in the hallway. She looked so much stronger than the person I’d met at the orientation, the woman who’d lost her baby and nearly her marriage too.
“What about you?” she said, nudging me affectionately. “You once told me you were afraid of being around sick people.”
“I guess Heartland General has worked its magic on both of us,” I said.
My visit with Bree was brief—she had just returned to her room after having some tests and was quite groggy—but I told her I was going away for a while and didn’t want her to wonder what had happened to me.
“Away where?” she asked through half-open eyes.
“Hollywood,” I said as I played with her blond curls. “I’ll be back in Middletown a lot because my family lives here, but I also want you to come and see me in Los Angeles as soon as you’re better, okay?”
Her eyes drooped even more and her usually expressive face was a blank. “If you meet any movie stars, maybe you’ll get me their autographs.”
“Of course I will,” I said, aware that for the first time since I’d known her she didn’t press the issue of a trip to Hollywood. She ignored my invitation, seemed content to have autographs, wasn’t imbued with her old zest and fighting spirit. I hoped she hadn’t given up on getting her transplant. It was her positive attitude that had kept her going. “Please be all right,” I whispered as I kissed her forehead, watched her fall asleep, and tiptoed out of the room.
I WAS PLANNING on making Bree my last patient, as I said, but as I was walking toward the elevator I came upon a black teenage boy in a wheelchair. He was out in the hall, spinning around and around in that chair, a big grin on his chubby face.
“Hey,” I said as he continued to whirl. “What’s got you so wound up today?”
“Nothing much,” he said, bringing the chair to a stop. It was only then I noticed that both of his legs were missing just above the knee. His lower body was draped with a blanket, but there was no mistaking the fact that there was very little flesh underneath it. I’d seen a lot in my stint as a volunteer. Brains had been sliced open. Backs had been broken and braced. Bodies had been teeming with cancer cells and then injected with drugs equally toxic. But this young man—this boy—was my first double amputee.
What I thought as I approached him was that we all have handicaps, some more incapacitating than others. It’s how we push through, how we climb over our obstacles that makes us brave. And this boy was brave. There wasn’t a hint of self-pity about him.
“Nothing much, huh?” I said, wishing I’d had my cart. All the teenage boys loved car magazines. “Then why the big smile? Did you hear good news from your doctor? Or did you have a special friend visit you this morning?”
“Nah. Nothing like that,” he said. “I just smile a lot.”
“I’m impressed,” I said. “Most people don’t smile enough.”
“Not me. I was born with a smile on my face,” he bragged.
“Oh, yeah?” I teased. “And how do you know that?”
“Ask my mother,” he said. “She’ll tell you.”
“Fine,” I said, enjoying our little game. “Bring her on.”
“She works on the sixth floor,” he said. “Go on up and talk to her. Name’s Rolanda.”
Rolanda. So Malcolm’s nurse was this kid’s mother. She tended to everybody else’s pain and suffering and never once let on that she had her own to deal with. Once again it was brought home to me that the hospital was filled with people to admire. I just hadn’t anticipated how torn I’d be about leaving it. Or them.
“I think I’m gonna believe you,” I said. “You were born with a smile on your face, and that’s all there is to it.”
“You here visiting somebody?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Bree Wiley. Have you met her?”
“Blond girl?”
I nodded. “She could use a friend—especially one with a smile like yours.”
“No problem,” he said. “I’m on it.”
He waved and wheeled himself back down the hall toward the entrance to pediatrics. As he disappeared from view, it occurred to me that I had Malcolm to thank for exposing me to the “heart” in Heartland General. If he hadn’t come to town, I would never have tried to pass myself off as a do-gooder—and then realized how much satisfaction there was in becoming one.
Part Three
Chapter Thirty-one
I loaded up the Honda with everything I had loaded it up with on the last trip (plus the black dress and the black underwear I’d bought for my date with Malcolm), and, after a tearful farewell to my mother, aunt, and grandmother, I hit the road. Before heading out of town, I stopped at the lake and sat on the beach and thought about why I was returning to Famous and Harvey. What I decided was that I must have really wanted my old job back if I wrote the story about Malcolm in the first place and that I owed it to myself to give it another try. Besides, what better way to mend my broken heart than to throw myself into my work? It was the right move, the sensible move. I would repair my professional reputation, earn some real money after my time-out, and be closer—at least geographically—to the man I loved. A no-brainer, as Tuscany would say.
I stayed with her once I got to L.A. three days later. She’d insisted that I be her houseguest while I reacclimated myself to the city, settled back in at the magazine, and searched for an apartment, and I took her up on her offer. We had dinner together every night during that period. Well, except for Tuesday nights, when she had her shift at a clinic in West L.A. Yes, she had become a volunteer in their magazines program. She said that my success in overcoming my fears had motivated her to follow in my footsteps; that she hoped to conquer her own fears, which included getting married and getting fat. She had made strides with the former; she was dating a nice male nurse. But she was still struggling with the latter; she couldn’t shake the idea that people who aren’t a size 2 should have gastric-bypass surgery. She was as zany as ever, but I didn’t realize how much I’d missed her until she was back in my life on a regular basis. She was a wonderful distraction and helped me not to think about Malcolm every minute of the day—no mean feat. Knowing he was nearby, seeing the occasional images of him in the newspaper or on television (he really was making himself more accessible to the media, and he was no longer wearing the hairpiece or the contact lenses), hearing through the grapevine that he was seeing Rebecca again…Well, it hurt, to put it mildly.
I found an apartment my first week in town: a light, spacious upper unit in a Spanish-style duplex in West Hollywood, only two blocks from my old place. It was exactly what I wanted, so I grabbed it. A week later, I moved myself and the things I’d been storing at Tuscany’s into my new home, then bought some snazzy furniture. The neighbor who lived downstairs was hardly ever there, and when he was, he was extremely quiet.
The same could not be said for Harvey, unfortunately. While he welcomed me back with great fanfare, he hadn’t lowered his decibel level at all.
“Sales of the Goddard issue were off the charts!” he raved a week after the story had run. “So now the question is: What does Ann Roth do for an encore?”
“What about an interview with Téa Leoni?” I said, since she had a new movie coming out. “I could talk to her about her humanitarian work. And, of course, I’d get into her marriage to David Duchovny—how they raise their kids in the glare of the spotlight, what it’s like to be half of a Hollywood couple.”
“Please,” he said dismissively. “People don’t even know who she is, let alone how to pronounce her name.”
Why does he bother to ask me for suggestions? I thought. He always ends up assigning me the person he wants me to interview.
“Who’s a big get now?” he said, rubbing his hands together as if he were about to tackle a meal. “Who’s fresh? Who’s hot? Who’s everybody talking about?”
“Neil Young had a brain aneurysm,” I said, giving the game another whirl. “Survival
stories are uplifting to readers.”
“Aging rocker?” He rolled his eyes. “I think we’ll let Rolling Stone have him.”
“Right.” Okay, I would officially shut up now.
“So who’s a big get? Who? Who? Who?” he said, sounding like an owl. “Wait! I got it!” He bolted up from his chair, waved his arms in the air, and knocked over the porcelain miniature of the pope that was resting precariously on his desk. “You’ll do Danny Moder! Mr. Julia Roberts! Everybody wants to know what it’s like to be married to her, what it’s like to have those twins with her, whether she really broke up his first marriage! He’s perfect! He hasn’t done any interviews with anybody!”
“He hasn’t done any interviews because she’s the star and he’s the behind-the-scenes guy,” I said. “He won’t do it, Harvey.”
“Like Goddard wouldn’t do it?” He laughed demonically. “Come on, you’ll figure it out. You’re my little killer.”
His little killer. I should have been thrilled.
I spent the next few days making calls, trying to cajole various publicists and managers and assistants into letting me interview Danny Moder. Nobody was saying no, absolutely not, but they weren’t giving me a green light either. It was clear that the wooing would be a long, drawn-out process, and I was finding—to my increasing surprise—that I couldn’t care less how it turned out. Nothing against Danny Moder, mind you. It was just that the hunt, the chase, the conquest of him, of any celebrity, wasn’t interesting to me anymore. I still loved L.A., loved being smack in the midst of the entertainment world, but the idea of expending all my time and energy on trying to extract pearls of wisdom from the stars or their spouses no longer held the same allure for me. Had I really blown my chance at happiness with Malcolm for this? I kept asking myself. This new apathy worried and confused me.
“I’m pursuing the interview, doing my best, but there’s no kick in it for me now,” I confided one night to Tuscany and James, who’d had a chin implant after his breakup with Walter. “I feel like I’m in a crazy competition over nothing.”
“It’s Malcolm,” said Tuscany. “You’re still mopey about him.”
“I am, but that’s not it,” I said.
“It’s Harvey,” said James. “He’s probably even harder to take in comparison with your terrific boss at the hospital.”
“He is, but it’s not that either,” I said. “It’s that none of this seems important. Not when there’s a girl back in Middletown who’ll die if she doesn’t get a new liver.”
My friends nodded and gave each other looks and tried to be supportive. But they didn’t understand what I was going through. I didn’t understand what I was going through, not after wanting to be around celebrities my whole life, wanting to be part of the action. I chalked it up to rustiness, to having been out of the rat race for so long. The rush would return once I got back into the swing of things, I decided.
And then came a panic attack—my first in a long time. I was supposed to meet an old high school buddy of Danny Moder’s for lunch at the Polo Lounge. Infiltrating a celebrity’s inner circle was Harvey’s favorite tactic for nailing an interview.
I pulled the Honda up to the hotel’s entrance, handed it off to the lone valet-parking attendant who’d deigned to park it, and proceeded up the stairs, only to come upon a crowd of people in the lobby. There must have been a special luncheon—a birthday party or a corporate function—and all the participants were leaving just as I was arriving. I found myself trying to squeeze through their mosh pit. Suddenly, my heart took a dive and I thought I might collapse. I looked for something to hold on to and saw nothing. And so I stood there amid the revelers, sweating, nauseated, dizzy, the works. When I realized what was going on, that I had relapsed, I started to panic even more and felt my legs turn to spaghetti. I lost the ability to swallow. I felt a thundering in my chest. I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t think of anything except getting out of there. Picturing Danny Moder’s high school friend sitting at the table I’d reserved for us, waiting impatiently for me, wondering why I was late, only made me suffer more. I was never late!
Unlike the disaster at the Santa Monica airport, this one didn’t involve me running away. Once the crowd dispersed and I found a wall to lean against, I rallied, collected myself, mopped my wet face, and hurried out to the restaurant, full of apologies having to do with—what else?—traffic. But the episode did force me to ask myself whether it was a coincidence. The timing, I mean. I’d been nearly panic free when I was volunteering. And yet now here I was, back at Famous and panicking again.
I may not have been the most self-aware person, but even I figured there had to be a connection. Especially when the attacks continued over the next few weeks—at the supermarket, on the freeways, at movie screenings. Clearly, my return to the magazine was triggering them. I’d been attempting to be the kind of journalist Harvey demanded I be, a woman I no longer recognized. That could cause someone to panic, couldn’t it?
It could. The question was: What was I going to do about it?
I CALLED SHELLEY, that’s what I did about it. No, she wasn’t a shrink, nor had we ever talked at any length about my anxiety disorder, but she was the most levelheaded person I knew and she was a survivor, my role model. If only I’d availed myself of her wise counsel when I was working at the hospital, Malcolm and I might still be together. I would not make the same mistake twice.
“Remember what I said the last time we saw each other?” she asked after I chronicled my setbacks and conveyed how discouraged I was. “I told you to hang on to whatever it was about Heartland General that made you whole again.”
“I remember.” It was so good to hear her voice. She always had a calming effect on me, a way of setting my mind at ease. “And I’ve tried to hang on to it.”
“What’s the ‘it?’”
“I guess it’s the feeling I got whenever I’d find a way to lift a patient’s spirits. A feeling of giving to others instead of obsessing about myself and all the catastrophes that could happen to me.”
“But from what you just said, you have been obsessing about yourself. You’ve lost sight of what made volunteering so rewarding for you.”
“The giving part, you mean.”
“Exactly. Look, Ann. I know you love being a writer for Famous, but where’s the giving in that?”
“Well, I’m providing readers with a light, entertaining distraction,” I said. “I saw how much the patients enjoyed the magazine, and it made me realize that the kind of fluff we put out has value. It takes people’s minds off their problems.”
“Fine, but is that the kind of giving that will nourish your soul?” She let the question dangle in the air for a few seconds.
“Not really,” I admitted. “Not anymore.”
“Then what if you could combine your familiarity with celebrities, your contacts, your experience in Hollywood with a cause of some sort? A program that helps people the way you helped them here at the hospital?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” I said, trying to follow her thread. There were plenty of charities in Hollywood, but they were all about raising huge sums of money and I had no experience doing that.
“You know how we have occasional visits from local luminaries? They’re not celebrities the way you think of celebrities, but they’re a big deal for Middletown.”
“Sorry, Shelley, but I still don’t get it,” I said, thinking that Malcolm had been the only celebrity in Middletown and nobody had even recognized him.
“Yes, you do,” she persisted. “For example, we had those players from the Royals come to offer encouragement to the patients in physical rehab. I told you about it. The team sends them to us every year as sort of a goodwill mission. It’s great PR for them and for major-league baseball in general.”
Right. I hadn’t seen the players that day, but I’d read articles about their visit in both the Crier and the Kansas City Star. It was great PR for the team and had a positive effect on the p
atients too.
“You might be on to something,” I said, an idea dawning. Well, a germ of an idea.
“No ‘might’ about it,” she said. “Just think of the goodwill missions you could arrange. That Rolodex of yours must be bulging with the phone numbers of celebrities and their publicists.”
“It is,” I said, nodding to myself, my excitement building.
“So? What about quitting your job at the magazine, since it’s obviously making you sick, and starting a company that serves as a liaison between celebrities and hospitals around the country? You’d be using your know-how to help others, to give, and in doing so your panic attacks will vanish, I’ll bet on it. And of course, those famous people you’ve been writing about would probably love to be photographed comforting patients. Talk about great PR. They’ll be beating down your door, Ann.”
Me, a liaison between the stars and the hospitals. Why not? Who better to do it? And how better to combine my skills and interests? Only the week before, People had a photo of Nicole Kidman visiting a girl with leukemia at a hospital in Sydney. And the week before that, 20/20 had a piece about Matt Damon and his friendship with a brain-damaged boy at a Boston hospital. My company could function as a clearinghouse of sorts. The hospitals could request specific celebrities, and I could get in touch with their publicists to try to bring them together. Or it could work the other way around. If Catherine Zeta-Jones wanted to meet with AIDS patients or Ben Stiller had a personal stake in seeing how stroke victims recover, I would be the one to make the connection for them. “It’s definitely something to chew on,” I said, feeling almost giddy with the idea, liberated. “I’d have to figure out how to earn a living from it though.”
“Couldn’t the celebrities pay you a fee for matching them up with the hospitals and patients? Lord knows, they make enough money to pay you.”