“I wiped out when I exited the taxi. Fingers crossed someone in line captured it on camera,” I said sarcastically.
“I know a place you can hide out till the heat dies down,” J. J. said with a wink. God, he was still so cute. But he was closing in on thirty-seven and still wearing clothes for people in their early twenties, trying to freeze time, hang on to boyhood forever. Thom had been a dad for eight years already. A single dad, no less. J. J. and Thom may have been the same age, but only one of them had grown up.
“I think we should fix your face,” Melody said. “Also maybe try to hide your hands from the camera; your nails are ragged.”
I’d been chewing them for three days straight, what did she expect?
“Oh good, they’re here,” she finished, relieved.
Melody’s team fluttered around me with powders and creams, horror-struck. They squinted at me as though my nearness pained them.
“What can we do?” J. J. asked. “To fix our friendship?”
“Nothing. You don’t have to do anything,” I said honestly.
“But we want to. God knows you’ve helped us,” Mel added.
“There is one thing. Could you have your publicist send a couple of autographed photos to the Hilton in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania?”
“Of course.”
Melody’s makeup guru wasn’t pleased with my squirming. “Hold still.”
The AD listened to her headset and then flicked it off and snapped her fingers at us. “We’re back in two minutes, get out there, get out there.”
I nudged Kelly in the ribs with my elbow. “TVs are rolling, Kel.”
“TVs are rolling,” the group repeated. I put my hand in the middle of the circle. Ever since her frantic warning on our first live tape day, captured forever in that blooper reel, we’d used that as our personal mantra before showtime. The others followed suit. We huddled up and lifted our hands. “TVs are rolling!”
Kelly smiled back at me, and the years melted away, as though no time had passed since our first live show and this one, as though no time had passed since that chaotic, bumbling beginning.
4
The next segment took a serious turn.
“Tara, could you speak to your experiences during and after the show, and how they may have contrasted with the others’ due to your race?”
Tara sipped her water. “How much time do we have?” she asked, which got a laugh. “It was definitely tougher, I’d say, for me to get work than for anyone else here. It was like, ‘We have a recurring character on one other show who’s black, so…maybe next year.’” She rolled her eyes. “Is it getting better? Slowly, yes, I think it is. But there’s still a long way to go.”
Brody shook his head in disgust. “You’ve had to work twice as hard as the rest of us to get half as much.”
Tara kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”
The audience aww’d at their PDA.
Cindi took this as permission to “go there.”
“You two are together…” she pointed out.
“We are,” Tara confirmed with a wide grin. “Two years this June.”
“I’ll get angry letters if I don’t address at least a few of the tabloid aspects of your lives,” Cindi remarked.
“Here we go,” Melody lamented, which got a big laugh.
“The love triangle,” Cindi began.
“It’s not like we planned it that way,” Brody protested. “We didn’t get together in a back room and say, ‘I know, let’s have a love triangle.’”
It took all the willpower I possessed to keep my expression neutral. That was literally what they’d done. The Seven-Year Plan. And written a low-down, dirty soundtrack to go with it.
“Still, was it painful, Melody? Did it hurt to see him move on with your former co-star and bandmate?”
“Manchot was a beautiful time in our lives,” Melody said.
Okay, now it took all the willpower I possessed to keep my expression neutral. Manchot had been a clusterfuck from start to finish.
“It’s all good,” Melody assured the audience. “If I had to lose, better to be to my duet partner than anyone else.”
Tara ejected herself from her seat and gave Melody a big hug, and the audience rose up for a standing ovation. If a camera had happened to catch my expression right then it would have been a rictus smile.
Cindi moved on to a new topic. “Kelly.”
“Yes?”
“While researching for this special, I ended up in a, what do people call it, a rabbit hole? A YouTube spiral?”
Kelly covered her face. “I know where this is going…”
“During this YouTube spiral I discovered a conspiracy theory about you—or rather, your Lion’s Den character…”
“It’s so meta that they let us keep our names, right?” Ethan said.
“Not me,” Brody said proudly. “I was Diego.”
“We know,” we all yelled back.
“First off,” Kelly said, “it was a dream sequence in a fairy-tale episode, like the Scooby-Doo episode. So even if I had licked a toad, it was part of a fantasy scene, it was never real. But I didn’t lick a toad! I kissed a frog to see if he was a prince. Fairy tale, remember?”
“So to put my mind at ease, the remaining episodes of the show’s run were not a hallucination occurring in Kelly’s mind.”
Kelly laughed. “No. Where does this stuff come from?”
“She has to say that, though,” J. J. teased. “She has to steer you away from the truth.”
For a gag in the next segment, everyone put their names in a hat, and the person who drew it had to perform the other one’s biggest hit. Ethan sang a strangely haunting, a cappella version of “Sock Me in the Face (Right Now),” Kelly and I sang OffBeat’s “Bubblegum,” and Melody performed a monologue from one of Ethan’s indie films where he was in love with a sock puppet.
As the others answered pre-vetted questions from the audience, my mind wandered and I decided not to think about what the future held. I decided not to speculate about whether I’d see anyone on this stage again, or if we’d drift away for good—softly, this time; in the natural due course of life, not an abrupt severing like we had five years ago.
Because there was only this moment. There was only this time.
Which was why I made us perform “Cabbage-Leaf Rag.”
“You guys are about to see something that never aired on Diego and the Lion’s Den,” I announced. “Something so wrong, it came all the way back around to being right.”
J. J. was the only one who remembered the moves, so he performed it properly while the rest of us fumbled. I sank into the memories of him and I. He’d been our strongest dancer—holding me up, coaching me through the moves, in the hallway of my parents’ house; in the San Diego Zoo itself; at the soundstage. When he’d guided my hands and feet, I’d never felt more capable. Never felt more graceful.
“Didn’t you have this skirt in high school?” J. J. said, then turned to the audience. “Y’all, she’s had this skirt since high school and she still fits in it.”
“Niiiice,” said Ethan jokingly, and high-fived Brody.
“That reminds me,” Cindi Cooper pointed out. “Footage captured earlier today shows you panhandling at a train station in northeast Pennsylvania. How much of a financial hardship was it for you to get here, Holly?”
I shook my head. Of course. Of course someone had shot a video of me. They weren’t kidding about the world judging their every move. It had only been three days of attention and I was so, so over it.
It occurred to me that despite her meltdowns every other year, Melody was well adjusted considering she’d been under a microscope more than half her life.
“Do you often take to the streets to earn money?” Cindi pursued me like she’d gotten me in her crosshairs. Thanks, Cindi! You’ve proven your journalistic chops for sure now.
“No, Cindi, I do not. But I do have another good memory from the ’nineties if you want to hear it.”
“By all means.”
“During the last episode of the first season, the Studdards—they were the producers of the show—didn’t know if we’d be renewed for a second one. The show was on the bubble, so they posted a caption over the credits that read, ‘Write to us and tell us what you think!’ But they forgot to include an address.”
Tara busted up laughing. “Madder than a bag of badgers.”
“Keep in mind this was before the internet, before fans could join together or create hashtags and aim them at the people in charge.”
“Yeah,” Ethan added, “Netflix wasn’t around to revive it like Gilmore Girls.”
“In a way, the Studdards were ahead of their time, and who knows, maybe they would have been inundated with letters. Except for that not-including-an-address part.”
The rest of the evening went smoothly and quickly, and before I knew it, we all held hands and bowed, to a standing ovation.
“Write and tell us what you think,” Tara shouted amid the applause, and the cheers and laughter grew in volume.
Backstage again, J. J. and I gravitated toward each other.
His soft, deep-brown eyes connected with mine. Bonelessly, I fell into his arms and we hugged for a long time. His warmth and strength were so familiar to me, it was like slipping into the past, accessing a time line that had veered away from me yet also existed forever. I honestly think that, for a time, I knew his body better than my own. We were extensions of each other, with so many overlapping experiences, it was difficult to know which memories were his and which were mine.
My eyes were wet again, and half my vision was blurry, as though I wore bifocals. I’d had a late-night talk with Renee the day after J. J. and I had had our first kiss.
“What if we don’t work out?” I worried. “He’s my best friend. I don’t want to lose that.”
“Holly,” Renee said patiently, “what do you think love is?”
I had a new definition of love, now. Love was acknowledging mistakes, and how much they hurt, and trying to do better next time. If there was a next time. If there could be one.
Thom had been right. This was a high school reunion. It wasn’t my life anymore. I had a different one now, one that I desperately wanted to return to.
“I have a train to catch,” I said apologetically, pulling away.
He looked disappointed. “You’re not staying for the after-show? The Jerry Levine special?”
“No. I’m going to leave that to the experts.”
“I know you were mad at us for not checking in with you, and I get that. But you know, a lot of things happened during the past five years that were tough for us, too.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Tara had surgery on her vocal cords. She was terrified she would never sing again. Ethan adopted the baby he had, you know, back then, and the baby’s sibling, because he knew they weren’t growing up in a good environment. And—”
“I heard about some of it after the fact. But I was busy raising my niece. I didn’t Google you guys for years.”
“What changed? Why did you decide to look us up now?”
“I don’t remember exactly,” I fumbled.
“If you didn’t Google us, how did you even know about the anniversary?”
Every cell in my body lurched. “I happened to be online and it was on a news ticker or something.”
He looked at me.
He could tell I was lying.
But he let it go.
“So, are you with that guy, now? The one you were kissing on YouTube last night?”
It was bizarre hearing him ask that. It was as though we’d picked each other’s names from Cindi Cooper’s hat and swapped roles.
“I’m not sure. I’d like to be. But we had a big fight before I got here.” The evening was a success, ultimately. But a wave of sadness approached me, getting closer. I hastened to leave.
“What we had…I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” he said.
“There was a time you wanted to,” I reminded him.
“I was going through a crisis of faith and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. That’s what I wanted to tell you on the phone when I called you. I mean, I was going to ask you about the anniversary, but I also wanted to invite you to my baptism. We had a whole ceremony. My parents even came to it,” he added with unmistakable pride.
“I’m happy for you.” They’d always been so tough on him; so unrelenting in their expectations of the way he ought to live, and how exactly he should show his devotion to God. I wasn’t sure if his adult baptism meant his parents had “won,” or whether it was more hopeful than that and meant J. J. was finally at peace with himself. But it wasn’t my problem anymore.
It had nothing to do with me.
I squeezed his hand one last time. Then I said goodbye to the boy I’d once loved, so I could try to make things right with the man I needed.
5
Two Months Ago
It was supposed to be temporary. Of course it was. Watching Lainey.
When I quit college and moved into my sister’s apartment to look after my sister’s baby, the circumstances were frightening. But it was only going to be for a few months. It was exhausting, taking care of a baby. But it also gave me a sense of importance. I was vital.
Then Renee opened her bistro and needed me to stay on a little while longer while the restaurant got on its feet, so I did. A few years passed, and the restaurant became a success. We moved into a house with a little yard and a guest cottage out back, where I could have some privacy. When I began charging, it wasn’t much—around $5 per hour, because Renee supplied the housing, food, and everything else I could need.
I loved that little girl like she was my own.
But that wasn’t the tough part. I could have survived it, if it was one-sided like that. The tough part was that she loved me right back, as though I were her mom.
We didn’t analyze it when she was a newborn. Babies don’t remember much before age three, only whether they felt loved and protected, which I was able to provide for her. I fully intended to get out of there before her memories started to form as a toddler, because even though that would have been difficult for me, it would have been worse for her and Renee if Lainey came to think of me as her mother.
But then Ian, Renee’s husband, returned from Iraq with injuries that were physical and emotional, and I knew if I left, they wouldn’t have been able to cope. When Renee and Ian divorced a few years after that, I remained where I was, because it would have been unfathomably cruel for me to up and leave, too. Lainey and her feelings and her recovery were the most important things, and I was the linchpin that held it all together. I was her constant.
As a result, Lainey rebuffed Renee’s help during any transition in her life. It was me she wanted to sing her to sleep after a nightmare, me she insisted on hugging before bed, me who had to drop her off on the first days of school, me she wanted to read stories to her with my funny voices.
We didn’t allow her to call me Mommy, we put a stop to that early on at least, but Lainey came up with a nickname for me: Molly. Holly, but with an M for Mommy. A way for Lainey to feel she had control over the situation.
It drove Renee crazy. “That’s not her name, Lainey. Her name is Holly. Please call her that.”
“Her name is Holly, but I call her Molly.”
We gradually reduced my role. Lainey signed up for lots of after-school programs and I took freelance writing jobs to keep busy during the day, but I still lived in the guest cottage. I was still there for dinner and playtime and visits to the zoo and birthdays and playdates on weekends. I was still there.
Until a final breakthrough with her therapist caused Renee to realize she would never become the mother she wanted to be, or have the relationship she yearned for with Lainey, unless I left.
So two months ago, she asked me to come have a chat in the kitchen, and she explained that it was time.
There is no easy way to s
ay, “I want my child back.”
So she couched it in other terms.
She laid it out as nicely as she could. She was firm but flexible. She said it was time for me to go, especially now that Lainey had so many after-school activities, and that I needed to move out, do my own thing, for my sake as well as theirs. I needed to have my own life.
She said I had saved hers, and Lainey’s, and it hadn’t been fair to me. She said she owed me more than she could ever repay.
I nodded and said she was right and walked outside in a daze. I didn’t deviate from the path I’d taken prior to the conversation. I didn’t go out that night or make plans with friends (what friends?) or start a list of things I wanted to do.
I walked back to the cottage, and I stayed there.
I spent every day in my pajamas. I didn’t come inside the house; didn’t want to bother the family that lived there. I had food delivered. I stayed in bed.
I went online.
I wondered what the last ten years had taken from me, and what they’d given me in return. Before, I could say I’d been noble. I’d been helping. Now they wanted me gone and I had nowhere to go. No degree. No real skills. Nothing to show for it. It was like I’d woken up from a long nap, and I should’ve been back in college, on opening night for Into the Woods, playing the role of Little Red Riding Hood. Couldn’t I get a do-over? Couldn’t I go back, and start over?
Better than that…couldn’t I go back to Diego and the Lion’s Den?
Lainey would be turning eleven in a few months. The same age as me when I booked the show. How could that be? She was so young.
What had I looked like, back then? What had all of us looked like, so long ago?
Easy enough to find out. I started with a Google image search and looked up my castmates. Instantly, hundreds of cast photos of us as kids lit up my screen.
I immersed myself in the past. In the lost opportunities. But soon I tired of the photos, the fan sites, the episode summaries, and Tumblrs about that bygone era.
I wanted current information.
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