On The Way Down

by Fox, Ella

When two paparazzos climbed the gate and turned up in our driveway, I pulled the curtains, closed the blinds, and started spending an inordinate amount of time in the house. I felt trapped because I was trapped. Anytime we left the house—together or apart—the press descended. It bothered us both that people were questioning when we’d gotten together and I was cast as a child bride.

  In the midst of all of this, the machine around Garrett was shifting to turbo because it was almost time for him to start the press junket for Knight and Play, the movie he’d filmed before Guns Out.

  I felt guilty, like my very presence was making his life more difficult. A day didn’t pass without him telling me how much he loved me and how happy I made him, but the self-doubt I was experiencing was, at times, crippling. In an effort to calm the media attention, I agreed to have Oprah come out to the house to interview us.

  The best thing I can say about that is that she was as soothing and kind as she appeared to be on television. It didn’t matter—I was so keyed up that I’d had no choice but to take half of a Klonopin that Harry offered me. I clung to my husband’s hand as we exposed our life to the world, detailing that we’d not touched until after I was eighteen.

  “Shaelyn and I aren’t stupid. We know people who think everything is a lie or who live for salacious stories will believe what they want to. We can’t change anyone’s opinion. At the end of the day, none of that really matters. We know the truth—and the truth is that we weren’t physical with each other or in a relationship until she turned eighteen.”

  “You obviously had feelings for each other before that,” Oprah pointed out.

  “That’s correct,” Garrett agreed. “Shae was four months away from her eighteenth birthday when we met. I knew that I had feelings for her—but out of respect for her, I neither acted on nor discussed them with her until the night her mother attacked her.”

  Oprah nodded as she turned her attention to me. “Much of my audience will have seen some of your mother’s media interviews. I imagine the things she’s saying are painful for you. Earlier this week she sold a story to a gossip magazine claiming that the altercation the two of you had in Utah was due to her telling you that you couldn’t see Garrett anymore. My producers obtained a copy of the police report, which doesn’t back her version of events. Will you tell us what really happened that night?”

  Jewel had been told to shut her damn mouth. She hadn’t, so we were addressing her abuse directly. It was a calculated decision, one that I had made on my own. Garrett tried too hard to protect me and while I appreciated that more than I could say, I was done with my mother’s crazy. Alan had given his blessing for me to talk about what had set Jewel off, which made the telling easier.

  I took a deep breath and nodded. “My relationship with Jewel was bad long before that night.”

  I then explained what had happened that night and why. I was surprised that Oprah was visibly upset. Reaching out, she took my free hand in hers. “We were given copies of the photos of your injuries. I’ve made the choice not to show them here because I believe putting you through that would be furthering the emotional and physical abuse your mother subjected you to for years. I want my audience to know that what happened to you that night resulted in your being rendered unconscious, which meant you needed to be taken to the hospital by ambulance. But for the grace of God, you could’ve been seriously hurt.”

  That was the hardest part of the interview for me. For some reason, her use of the word abuse hit me hard. I knew she wasn’t wrong, but I’d never understood how pervasive Jewel’s manipulations had been until people—like Oprah—pointed it out.

  I didn’t have long to think about it at that moment since the first portion of the sit-down interview concluded not long after. We then walked her—and her film crew—into Garrett’s office and allowed her to look at our wedding album. She was given carte blanche to include any of the photos in the album in the broadcast. The one that caught her eye was a framed candid on Garrett’s desk that Goldie had taken. Garrett and I had been seated at the table where our meal had been served. In the photo, we were turned in our seats to face one another, and we were laughing. Real laughter, nothing posed. Oprah nodded as she held the frame up.

  “Interviewing celebrity couples is always a delicate balance. Some people act it up and make it seem like they care for each other when the reality is that they couldn’t be more incompatible. That’s not the case with the two of you. Anytime we’ve paused taping today, I’ve been able to see for myself that you’re very much in love. I see it here in this photo, too. The audience at home will understand what I’m talking about when they see this photo.”

  The final segment had taken place back in the living room. I felt myself tensing when Oprah asked if we’d talked about if or when we would have children. The God’s honest truth was that we hadn’t.

  “I can’t wait to have babies with this woman, but we’re enjoying this time together alone and plan to for at least five years,” Garrett answered.

  Five years would put me at twenty-three and that wasn’t nearly old enough for me. I’d always wanted to wait until at least thirty-five, but the way Garrett’s eyes lit up at the mention of children suggested that was too many years to wait.

  I wondered if marrying me meant he would be forced to make adjustments and sacrifices he didn’t want or really need to.

  * * *

  The Oprah interview worked as intended. It didn’t totally curb the appetite the public had for details of our life, but it calmed people down enough that we were able to have a semblance of a normal life. The headlines changed from child bride to a love too big to be denied.

  The public was overwhelmingly sympathetic to what I’d been through with Jewel, which meant no one was buying her stories anymore. That, along with a prescription for Prozac, helped ease a good bit of my anxiety.

  It was still a hell of an adjustment, getting used to being married to someone so famous. I’d gone into our marriage knowing that about him, but I hadn’t fully understood how that fame would rub off on me. I went from being Shaelyn Monroe, any-girl USA to Shaelyn Riordan, celebrity wife in the blink of an eye. I noticed people staring at or whispering about me whenever I went out, so I avoided going places alone.

  A lifetime of trying to blend in and fly under the radar had been annihilated with two words—I do. Even though I hated the attention, I loved Garrett enough to make the loss of my anonymity worth it. I walked the red carpets with my husband for the premieres of Knight and Play in Los Angeles, New York, and London. It wasn’t easy and I didn’t enjoy it, but I was proud of myself for doing it.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  January 2000

  The first year or our marriage was incredible. Waking up next to the love of my life was a blessing, one that never got old.

  I’d also stumbled into a career, and it was one I hadn’t seen coming. I was officially on the payroll with the Riordan family company as a script reader. Being paid to read was amazing. It was like the job had been created just for me.

  Things were perfect until something happened that turned my world upside down.

  * * *

  My period was late. I didn’t panic on the first or the second day that it didn’t come, but on the third day, a niggle of fear crept into my mind. I took my birth control at the same time every single day, and I’d never missed a pill—not even once. The fourth day, I found myself pacing at random times throughout the day. I couldn’t be pregnant, I assured myself. I followed the instructions to the letter. My body had to be adjusting itself for some reason. Yes. That was is. Maybe I was just skipping a month. That was a thing, right?

  On the fifth and sixth days of my period not starting, I forced myself not to think about it at all. Ignore it, ignore it, ignore it, I chanted to myself.

  Garrett asked me why I was on edge a dozen times—and each time, I blamed it on my anxiety. I could see that he was concerned that I was experiencing symptoms in spite of the Prozac I was taki
ng, but I reminded him the doctor had said that could happen from time to time.

  I justified not telling him about my pregnancy fears by assuring myself that there was nothing to worry about.

  Two weeks after my period should’ve started, I knew I needed to get real. There was no way I could go to the pharmacy to pick up pregnancy tests myself, so I called Goldie and asked her to overnight mail me a few. She stayed cool as a cucumber while I babbled like an over-anxious freak.

  Although I was a married woman who had just celebrated her first wedding anniversary, I was still too young to be a good mother.

  The best-laid plans went up in flames two days later when I was staring at four positive pregnancy tests on the bathroom counter.

  I slid down the wall to the floor and hugged my knees to my chest as I wept. I’d prayed for every one of those tests to be negative, and each prayer had been denied.

  When I was able to get up, I went into the bedroom and called Goldie. She let me cry it out for two hours while I sobbed and railed about how badly I’d fucked up. She pushed back when I admitted that I was thinking of having an abortion. “Talk to your husband, peanut breath. This child is part of both of you, and you can’t make a decision like that on your own.”

  I hung up in a daze, my mind going seven thousand miles an hour. When it occurred to me that Garrett would be home within a few hours, I gathered the tests, put them in a black trash bag, tied it off, and buried it in the bottom of our kitchen trash can.

  The following morning, I made an emergency appointment with my doctor. After confirming that I was, in fact, pregnant, she told me that there were a small percentage of women who experienced birth control failure when they took antidepressants. I snapped out on her, asking why I’d never been told that before, but the reality was it changed nothing. No matter how it had happened, I was still pregnant.

  “If having this baby isn’t what you want, there are other options,” she pointed out in a matter-of-fact way.

  End the pregnancy or have a child. Both options scared the shit out of me.

  * * *

  I went back and forth and round and round at least a thousand times over the next three days. I prayed for a feeling or a sign, something that would tell me what the right decision was. The morning of the third day, I walked into the kitchen and found Garrett making his morning shake while he sang along to Here Comes the Sun as it played on the kitchen radio. I knew that was the sign I’d been praying for.

  He looked over at me and smiled as he poured his shake into a tall plastic cup. “You want one?”

  I grimaced and shook my head. “No, I don’t want one of your ‘wannabe vanilla but really tastes like cardboard mixed with sewer water’ shakes. I’m eating for two now and I think our baby would hate the taste as much as I do.”

  The cup he’d been holding slipped from his hand and fell to the floor. “Are you… did you just say we’re having a baby? Are you pregnant?”

  I nodded, feeling a bit nervous. When he raced across the kitchen, pulled me up into his arms, and hugged me like I was a prize he’d just won as he whooped with joy, I knew that I’d never need to wonder if he wanted to be a dad. I was even more certain when I saw the tears in his eyes when he dropped to his knees and started kissing my still flat stomach.

  * * *

  It didn’t take long for me to come around to the idea of being a mother. My first visit to the OB/GYN not only triple confirmed that I was pregnant, it let us know that our child was due on my birthday. That meant I was a bit farther along than I’d thought, which panicked me because I’d been taking birth control and Prozac for the first seven weeks of the pregnancy. The doctor assured me that the risk of complications was low and that since I’d immediately stopped taking anything other than prenatal vitamins, she was confident everything was fine.

  As far as pregnancies went, mine was a breeze. I had no morning sickness, so the aches and pains of having a person growing inside of me were nothing to complain about. My state of mind was further enhanced by the way my husband looked at me as my body expanded, as if I’d never been more beautiful to him. He rubbed cocoa butter on my growing belly every night while he sang different Beatles songs to our baby.

  Every once in a while I’d laugh as I thought back to the weeks I’d been panicked about being pregnant. I couldn’t believe how much I’d feared what I came to look forward to with all of my heart.

  At my six-month checkup, we were given the option to find out the sex. We’d decided that we definitely wanted to know. I wasn’t even a little bit surprised when the ultrasound confirmed what I’d thought for months—we were having a daughter.

  “What should we name her?” Garrett asked as he pulled out of the garage at the doctor’s office.

  That started a ten-day period where we spent all of our time considering and then discarding one name after another. It was when we got to the M part of the baby names book that Garrett snapped his fingers.

  “What do you think of Melody?” he asked. “We love music and the way she dances around when I sing to her tells me she does, too.”

  I smiled as I rolled the name around in my head. “Melody Riordan sounds perfect to me.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  July 2000

  At eight and a half months pregnant, I felt like an uncoordinated whale. Nothing fit, I was boiling hot whenever I went outside, and I spent a good portion of every day running to the bathroom because I constantly felt like I had to go. For all of that, I was still happier than I could ever remember being.

  The air-conditioning in the house was permanently set to sixty-eight, the perfect temperature for me not to feel like I was sweltering. I laughed as Garrett and I swayed back and forth in our living room to Edwin McCain’s I Could Not Ask For More. I was wearing a navy summer dress with spaghetti straps and he was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved white tee. “You big baby,” I chuckled. “You act like we live in the frozen tundra.”

  “Baby, I’m pretty sure we do,” he said wryly. “It’s the last week of July and The LA power grid is in danger of exploding because of you.”

  “Blame Melody.” I smiled. “She’s the one who makes Mommy so hot.”

  He laughed and dropped a kiss on my lips. “You were hot long before I knocked you up with my super sperm,” he joked.

  “Oh, you,” I laughed.

  Rubbing his hand over my heavily rounded stomach, he smiled at me. “How’s she doing in there?”

  “She’s been pretty quiet for the last few hours, so maybe she’s starting to get into position.”

  His eyes lit up. “You think?”

  I shrugged. “A lot of women go over in their first pregnancy but there are nearly as many who go a little earlier. We’re within the window now so delivery could be any time now. We’ll find out if I’m dilated when we go to our appointment tomorrow.”

  “I can’t fucking wait to meet her.”

  I smiled. “Me either.”

  * * *

  I wanted to believe that I was asleep, trapped in a bad dream. I told myself that I was imagining the look on Dr. Bernard’s face as she did an ultrasound. I knew I was wide-awake when I looked up at Garrett. He was frozen in place and all color had vanished from his face. Something was wrong.

  Our doctor whispered something to the nurse, who quickly left the room. A minute later, another doctor came in. He took over doing the ultrasound, and whatever he saw caused him to make a face not unlike what Dr. Bernard had. He turned and shook his head, once, at our primary doctor.

  “Shaelyn, Garrett,” Dr. Bernard said softly, “I’m so, so sorry. There’s no heartbeat.”

  No heartbeat.

  No heartbeat.

  No heartbeat.

  “What does that mean?” Garrett asked, his voice hoarse.

  “The baby is no longer alive,” Dr. Bernard said.

  Garrett asked questions—how, why?

  I said nothing. I was certain if I just stayed quiet, I’d wake up and everything
would be normal. This isn’t happening, I told myself. Pregnancy dreams are a thing. All women have them.

  Melody is alive.

  Melody is alive.

  Melody is alive.

  I only realized I’d been screaming those three words on a loop when I felt a needle pricking my arm. And then, I felt nothing at all.

  * * *

  Fourteen hours later, I was in what appeared to be the world’s quietest delivery room. Instead of the loud and bustling delivery room I’d prepared for all those months, what I got was solemn. It was macabre that we’d lost our child but still needed to go through the birthing process. I heard Dr. Bernard tell Garrett that in situations like ours it was a blessing that they could use powerful sedatives to help me through it.

  She was wrong. My senses were dulled, but the pain in my heart didn’t lessen even a little bit. Garrett held onto me like I was drowning and he was a life raft throughout the entire process. I knew he spoke words of encouragement and love, but every single one broke me a little bit more.

  When I pushed for the last time and she arrived, the stillness in the air felt like a thousand knives to my heart. It was that lack of sound that broke through the fog I’d allowed myself to fall into. Our baby was silent and still, her journey having ended before she ever took a breath or let out a cry.

  I’d been sure I wouldn’t be able to stand it, but when they asked if we wanted to hold her, I said yes before Garrett was able to utter one syllable.

  When they brought her to our room and lifted her from the rolling cradle, I saw that she was in the beautiful pale pink outfit and soft white blanket I’d bought to bring her home in. I looked to Garrett, surprised to see things from home. He reminded me that Goldie had flown in before explaining that she had stopped at our house on the way to the hospital to get the bag. She was with his parents and Alan in the waiting room.