by Meg Cabot
“I understand,” Tania says, and she looks down at her fingers. On the third finger of her left hand is a diamond that’s approximately the size of Dayton, Ohio, or possibly even Paris, France. “Jordan can be a little . . . babyish about some things.”
“Yes,” I say, surprised by the maturity both of the admission and of her tone. “He can be sometimes.”
“I’m sorry I did that to you,” Tania says, speaking to her diamond ring. “What you caught me doing that day with Jordan. I knew you were still with him, but I . . . I needed to.”
You needed to give my live-in boyfriend a blow job? I want to ask.
Instead I say, “I understand,” even though I don’t.
“Have you ever been married before, Heather?” Tania asks, still looking at her ring.
“No,” I say, unable to restrain a smile. Tania doesn’t mean to be funny, I know, but I can’t help laughing a little. It suddenly strikes me as amusing that she’s about to give me some marital advice, even though I’m so much older than she is. She’s closer to Jessica and Nicole’s age than Jordan’s.
“Well,” she says with a gusty sigh, “I have. That’s why all this is happening.”
“Wait,” I say, my smile disappearing as I realize Tania was asking if I’ve been married before because she has. But that’s impossible, because the girl is barely old enough to drink legally . . . plus a few years. “What?”
“That’s why all this is happening,” she repeats. “You’re right, I do owe you the truth. And you know what? I feel better about it now that I’ve told you.” She smiles and picks up her dog, giving him a little squeeze. “Wow, you’re easy to talk to. I knew you’d understand. No wonder you’re so good at your job. I bet those students tell you stuff all the time. Secret stuff they’ve never told anyone before, like what I just told you. I’ve never told that to anyone before, not even my stylist. Or Jordan.”
I’ve thrown off the chinchilla rug, put both feet on the floor, and am staring her straight in the face. Only she won’t look at me, because her face is buried in Baby’s fur.
“Tania,” I say. “What exactly are you talking about? What secret? What is happening?”
“Everything,” she says with a shrug of her elfin shoulders as she hugs Baby so tightly that he begins to struggle. She doesn’t let him go, she doesn’t look up, and her voice is muffled as she hides her face in shame. “Why I had to steal Jordan away from you. Why Bear got shot. And why Jared died today.”
“Why?” I ask, even though I think I finally know.
When she looks up at last, her cheeks are wet with tears.
“Because of my ex-husband,” she says. “He says he’s going to kill me.”
Chapter 17
Baby Mama Drama
Baby mama
That’s what he calls me
Don’t want no drama
So I don’t say a thing
But I ain’t his mama
And this ain’t his baby
So there’s gonna be trauma
If I don’t nip this thing
“Baby Mama”
Performed by Tania Trace
Written by Larson/Trace
Cartwright Records
So Sue Me album
“So what’d she say?” Cooper asks as soon as he climbs back into the Cadillac Escalade in which we’re being driven home. He’s just come from escorting Tania and Jordan up to their apartment, which is in a building a few blocks downtown and west, on Fifth Avenue, from Grant Cartwright’s. I elected to stay in the car, too disturbed by the story Tania told me back at Cooper’s parents’ place to do more than utter a polite good night.
“I’ll tell you when we get home,” I say, my gaze on the driver.
“Are you sure?” Cooper asks, looking surprised.
“Oh yes,” I say. “I’m sure.”
Cooper, after giving me a questioning glance, leans forward to give the driver our address, and I sink back against the hand-stitched leather seats, staring unseeingly out the tinted window.
“Just making sure Dad gets his money’s worth,” Cooper had joked when Jordan—and the building’s doorman—insisted it wasn’t necessary for him to accompany Tania all the way to the door and then inside the apartment she shares with Jordan.
“Our security in this building is very good, sir,” the doorman said to Cooper. “We have a night watchman posted at the door to the garage downstairs and monitors on all the exits and stairwells.”
“And our lock’s a Medeco,” Jordan pointed out proudly.
“I think you should let him,” I’d said from inside the Escalade.
Cooper, Jordan, and the doorman had all leaned into the open car door to look at me oddly. Tania kept her face buried in her Chihuahua’s sparkly jacket, looking at no one at all.
“Excuse me, miss?” the doorman had said.
“I think they should let this man escort them to their apartment,” I’d said. “I’ll wait down here in the car for them. It will just take a minute. I don’t know if you heard, but there was a murder today. A stalker of Ms. Trace sent her a box of cupcakes tainted with rat poison, and someone ate one and died. Whatever your building’s normal security precautions are for her, quadruple them. And do not eat or even open anything addressed to her. I’m sure the police have been by—”
The doorman was a young guy. “Actually,” he said, swallowing hard, “I just started my shift. I haven’t even had a chance to read the log notes—”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Cooper said and draped his linen sport coat over Tania’s shoulders as he walked her into the building, the doorman and Jordan following closely behind. “Cooper Cartwright Security Services. Can’t get rid of me until I’ve briefed all your staff and checked under your bed for intruders. Only then do I call it quits for the evening.”
The funny part—if you can call it funny—is that I haven’t yet had a chance to tell Cooper the terrifying tale Tania had dropped on me like a hydrogen bomb an hour earlier. It had been almost a relief when Nicole had come bursting into the media room, demanding that Tania and I watch a DVD of her performance in the talent competition at her all-women’s college the year before, in which she’d come in third (in the single-vocalist division).
“Moooom,” Jessica had shrieked, coming close on her twin’s heels, “she’s making people watch it again!”
I enjoyed the video—in which Nicole performed the Eagles’ “Witchy Woman” on guitar—since it gave me a chance to try to process Tania’s confidences. Eventually the whole family drifted in from the deck, Cooper ending up sitting on the arm of the leather couch beside me.
“Are you all right?” he’d leaned in to whisper at one point, pretending to be reaching for one of the whiskeys his father had poured for everyone but Tania. “You look . . . freaked out.”
Who wouldn’t have been? Tania’s story had bordered on the . . . I didn’t even know what.
“Fine,” I’d whispered back. But I was relieved when Cooper suggested we all head home a few minutes later, noting that Tania seemed tired.
“Are you sure?” Jordan had asked, seeming reluctant for the evening to end. “We could stop by my place and have a Drambuie. Well, we three could.” He gave his sisters a dark look. “They’re not invited. And Tania usually likes chamomile tea before bed these days.”
The girl known for raunchy hits like “Bitch Slap” and “Candy Man” hadn’t tried to deny it. Instead, she and I exchanged glances. She’d made me swear to tell no one—no one—what she’d told me. It was a matter, she’d said, of life and death. Her baby’s life and her death.
I believed her, now more than ever. In the few minutes Cooper was upstairs in Tania and Jordan’s apartment, leaving me alone in the car with my thoughts and the Cartwrights’ driver, I heard the words “New York College” from the radio the driver was listening to softly in the front seat.
“Can you turn that up, please?” I asked and then regretted it immediately when he did so.
I dropped my face into my hands, Tania’s words echoing in my head. “I met my husband in high school. We were in choir together. I was a soprano. He was a tenor. But I could sing any part, so sometimes if Mr. Hall needed me to, I’d sing alto. I didn’t care, as long as I was singing. Singing is the only thing that’s ever made me truly happy.”
I’d sat looking at Tania in the glow of the television screen—the only light in the windowless room. She’d seemed so fragile and vulnerable.
“Maybe,” she’d added, glancing down at the barely perceptible bulge of her belly, “having a baby will make me happy. I’ve heard people say they never knew true joy until they looked down into the eyes of their newborn, but I don’t think those people know what it feels like to sing. When I sing . . . it’s like nothing can touch me. You know?”
This statement didn’t surprise me. Given her meteoric rise to fame, it made sense. Successful people are generally happiest when they’re doing what they love.
What did surprise me was the odd statement about why she loved singing so much. That I couldn’t relate to. Like nothing could touch her? What did that even mean? Who—or what—was trying to touch her?
And where had this ex-husband come from? I’d never heard about Tania having an ex-husband, let alone one from as far back as high school. How could Tania Trace have an ex-husband? How had Cartwright Records managed to keep this off her Wikipedia page, let alone “Page Six”? She and Jordan had just had a million-dollar wedding—in St. Patrick’s Cathedral no less! The Catholic Church is generally pretty thorough about checking up on this stuff.
“We were good,” Tania said, rubbing Baby’s ears. “We were the smallest school from the poorest district in our county, but we got invited to State. You know when you’re singing onstage in a group, and all the voices blend together perfectly, and you hear that ringing sound, like a bell, inside your head?”
That’s when I realized she was talking about her choir, not how well she and her high school boyfriend had gotten along as a couple.
“Uh . . . sure, I guess,” I said, lowering my gaze. I didn’t want her to see the tears that formed in my eyes. It sounded silly, but I was familiar with the sound she was talking about. I hadn’t realized until precisely that moment how much I missed it. “So that’s what happened when you performed? You guys got that ringing sound together?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling as if relieved that I understood. “We . . . blended, you know? The whole auditorium would fall silent after one of our performances, sitting there, listening to the last echo of our voices fading away . . . only then would they stand up and start clapping. What’s that called, Heather?” she asked me, with a naïveté that reminded me a little of Jordan.
“A standing ovation?” I asked.
“No, not that. When voices blend together like that?”
Generosity, I wanted to tell her. When no single vocalist tries to outperform any of the others onstage, because they’re all working for the good of the group. It’s called good showmanship and generosity, and it’s extremely rare. It tends to happen only in professional choirs and, I was fairly certain, in whatever choir Tania Trace happened to be in, because everyone else in it sensed what a fantastic talent she had and was hoping some of it might rub off on them.
If one wanted to be cynical about it, one could surmise that maybe they’d hoped that, if they stayed on her good side, Tania would think kindly of them when she was famous one day, as surely they’d known she would be, and treat them kindly in return. That’s what show business was all about.
“I don’t know,” I’d said instead, wanting to steer the conversation back to her boyfriend . . . and now ex-husband, stalker, and would-be killer. “Tania, I don’t think that had anything to do with him or the rest of the choir. I think that was you. Because obviously you’re the one who went on to have such a fantastic career. Did you ever think of that?”
She shook her head so vehemently that the curls went flying everywhere. “No,” she said. “We came in first. First in the whole state. That was because of him, because he was so talented and so driven, and made me believe I could be someone special. He was the one who said we should get married and move to New York City, and that I should try auditioning for Broadway shows.”
Of course he had. There’d been no generosity involved. The guy had wanted to use her as his ticket to fame, the way Mrs. Upton was using Cassidy, the way my mom and Ricardo (and let’s face it, my dad) had used me.
“What about your parents?” I asked. “Didn’t they think you should maybe slow it down some, take some college classes or whatever first?”
“I’m not like you, Heather,” Tania said, smiling a little ruefully, like I’d said something sweetly funny. “I didn’t have parents who did things like save up for college.”
As it happened, neither did I, but I didn’t see the point in mentioning this.
“My dad left when I was a baby,” Tania went on. “My mom was real supportive when I told her I was moving to New York, because she was having a hard enough time feeding my three little brothers on what she was making at the restaurant. Plus”—the color began to rise in Tania’s face—“she’d remarried, and with my new stepdad, well, it was getting kind of crowded in the house . . .”
I could only imagine how “crowded” it was getting in the house and how positively Tania’s mother must have viewed Tania’s decision to move to New York, especially when it came to getting her away from the new stepdad. You don’t become one of People magazine’s fifty most beautiful overnight. Tania must have been as much of a knockout back then as she was now.
“So you got married and moved here,” I said.
“Yeah,” Tania said, looking at one of her bare feet, peeking out from beneath the faux-fur chinchilla. She had a gorgeous pedicure to match her dark, glossy purple manicure. The manicurist must have bungled the finish on her smallest toe, since Tania found a rough spot and began to pick at it. “And even though I know we should have been happy as newlyweds, it was much harder than I thought it was going to be, at first. The only apartment we could afford was this tiny one-room studio in Queens on the second floor above this bar, so not only was it noisy, but it was filled with cockroaches. When you turned the light on, they’d all skitter away to hide under the refrigerator.” I noticed she was tugging harder at the nail polish. “But Gary said as soon as I got a job, we’d move to a better place. And we did, after I got signed as one of the backup singers on Williamsburg Live, do you remember that show? Probably not, it got canceled after one season. Then we got a better place, in Chinatown. It was still only one room, but at least it didn’t have roaches. And then we got an even better apartment after I got hired as a backup singer for Easy Street when they went on that European tour. And then I got the contract with Cartwright Records—”
“And what was Gary doing while you were working at all these jobs?” I asked, thinking how common her story was, repeated day in, day out, at lea
st in New York City. Poor girl meets poor boy. Poor girl marries poor boy, and they move to the big city to pursue their big dream. There, poor girl meets rich boy, becomes a big star, and dumps poor boy. Poor boy tries to murder girl in revenge.
“Well,” she said, biting her lip, “that was the thing. Gary was my manager—”
“What?” This was a different twist on the story.
“Gary was my manager,” Tania repeated. “So he worked real hard with me on my vocal training and spent a lot of time on the phone with people, trying to get me auditions and stuff. The thing was, I don’t think he really had that many connections, or as many as he said he did, coming from Florida. I started getting the feeling he was mostly annoying people—”
I bet he was, some high school kid who’d hitched himself to a star like Tania’s. I bet he’d annoyed a lot of people. It was amazing no one had tried to murder him.
“So . . .”—Tania picked harder at her toe—“I started going out to auditions on my own, jobs I heard about through other girls. I didn’t want to make Gary mad. I did it because I loved him, and I wanted to prove what we had was special. I thought things would get better when I got some work. He was so stressed out because I wasn’t really making a lot of money for us,” Tania said. “It was my fault, really. He’d get so stressed, he’d say things he didn’t mean.”
“What kinds of things?” I asked, keeping my voice neutral with an effort. I wanted to go back out onto the deck, find Cooper, and tell him to go after this Gary guy with everything he had—including, and most especially, his gun.