“It’s a good weeknight adventure. I’ve been boring for a while. It’s good to break out and do something a little wild again.” He picked up his phone. “Speaking of, I’ve got to text my brother.”
She opened the car door.
“I’ll throw all of this away and fill up my water bottle. And go to the bathroom.” She suddenly had no idea how she’d managed to hold it for this long, and raced inside.
Of course there was a line for the bathroom, but it was miraculously short. When Anna walked out, she turned in the direction of the water dispenser, until the teenagers who came out after her stopped her.
“Um, we were just talking about this and you look just like Anna Gardiner! But then we were like, what would Anna Gardiner be doing here, but maybe you’re filming? Somewhere nearby?”
Oh shit. She’d been so in her own world, she hadn’t remembered to pull her hoodie up over her head to walk into the bathroom. She didn’t want to blow off these girls, but she also did not want to have to be Anna Gardiner right now, and take selfies with them that would absolutely turn up on Instagram or TikTok or somewhere else, and then have to answer questions about why the hell she was at an In-N-Out somewhere in central California late at night on a Thursday. She opened her mouth to say something, she had no idea what.
“Lulu! There you are!” Ben grabbed her hand. “Honey, we have to get back on the road, I’ve been waiting for you!”
She gripped his hand and smiled at the girls.
“I get that all the time, such a compliment! Have a great night. Get home safe.”
They strolled back to the car, hand in hand, as Ben monologued, she assumed for the benefit of whoever might be watching them.
“So I said, are you kidding me? I’ve got to have those hogs by morning! And then he said, hogs! I thought we were talking about cows! Are you sure it’s hogs? And so I said, of course we’re talking about hogs! Why do you think I named my company Pigs R Us?”
By that time, they were back at the car, so Anna could get inside and let her laughter burst out of her.
“Pigs . . . R . . . Us?” she finally said, bent over so far her head was almost on her lap.
“Look, I had to say something!” Ben started the car. “Someone walked by with a Peppa Pig shirt on, and it made me think of pigs, so I just . . . went with it.”
She rolled the window down, now that they were safely out of the parking lot and on their way back to the freeway.
“Also—do I look like a Lulu? Where did that come from?”
“Look, Little Miss Questioning Everything, which one of us got us out of there and into the parking lot without you having to pose for pictures or whatever, and which one of us stood there with a blank smile on her face with no idea what to say? Because I know which one is which!” She could tell he was smiling, even in the dark. “Also. Your pants. Um, that’s why the Lulu.”
She looked down at the yoga pants she’d been in all day. At least if she had to do this road trip in the same outfit she’d been in since seven a.m., thank goodness it was this one and not the form-fitting dress she’d been wearing the day before.
“My pants? What do you . . .” She laughed. “Oh. My pants, I get it. How did you even know my brand of yoga pants?”
He flashed a grin at her.
“I’m in advertising, remember? I know a lot that no one would expect me to know.”
She settled back into her seat, a smile still on her face. And then remembered something.
“Thanks. For the rescue back there, I mean. I wasn’t thinking. I have no idea why I went into the bathroom without my hoodie up or sunglasses on or something.”
That had been a very close one.
“It’s been a long day,” he said. “Even stars struggle with a day like you’ve had. Plus, you’re a delicate flower now, you haven’t been inside a fast-food restaurant in years. You forgot how to do it!”
She laughed and rolled her window back up as they got on the freeway.
“Yeah, I guess I did. And, yeah, it has been a long day.”
Speaking of. She pulled her phone out of her pocket to check, but there was nothing from either her parents or her brother. If she texted Chris and told him she was on her way to Palm Springs, he would . . . actually, she had no idea what he would do. Part of her wanted to do it, just for the amusement factor, but no, it was late and he was probably worried enough as it was—she shouldn’t freak him out.
What would be at the other end of this freeway? She’d been holding that fear at bay ever since she’d gotten into the car with Ben, but she knew it was just hanging out there, somewhere behind her jokes and her attraction to him and the smile that hovered around her face.
Her dad’s heart attack and subsequent surgery a few years ago had been hard enough. But at least then, they’d had a plan for the surgery, she trusted his doctors, and she’d been there the whole time during the surgery, in the waiting room with her mom. But even then, she’d been terrified. Terrified of losing him.
And now . . . he was in an unfamiliar city, with doctors who didn’t know him and who might ignore him or mistreat him because of the color of his skin, in a hospital she didn’t know, and it was an emergency, and she knew if she let the fear show its face, it would choke her. She tried to push it back inside, but she could feel it gaining force.
“Do you want me to drive?” she asked. “I feel bad you’ve been driving this whole time. We should have switched in the parking lot. I’m sorry I didn’t think of it then.”
Ben shrugged.
“Don’t worry about it. You seem exhausted, no offense.” He shook his head. “I shouldn’t have said that—there’s no such thing as ‘no offense’ when you’re telling a woman she looks tired. I just meant you already fell asleep once and when you did, you were out like a light, and that’s not the energy I like to bring to a drive down 5 at ten at night. Plus, I just drank a very large Coke—not diet, real, actual, Coca-Cola—which I got for both the caffeine and the sugar to hype me up to drive, so I can’t waste all of that.”
Just listening to Ben prattle on made her breathe slower. She took another breath in and let it out. Thank goodness she was with him.
For a moment, she let herself think again about what it would have been like to be in the back seat of some town car right now, with a silent driver, hurtling from LAX to Palm Springs, lonely and scared and with nothing to distract her except her phone, where she would probably be scrolling through social media and WebMD and all of the other places that would stress her out even more. And then she turned to look at Ben in the driver’s seat, a smile dancing around his lips as he bopped along to Kesha, and she let out a breath. Thank God she was here.
“How on earth did you make the switch from being a backup dancer to being in advertising?” she asked him. Yeah, she was curious about this, but she mostly just wanted to get him talking again.
He laughed.
“Is it that weird of a trajectory? I think it was just that after having been on the other side of the camera for a while, both dancing and also with the crew work, I was so fascinated by how the whole package was made. I knew being in the actual production side or in front of the camera wasn’t for me, so I tried to figure out what was for me.”
His voice sounded so warm and comfortable next to her. She relaxed into it.
“Why didn’t you think being in front of the camera was for you? I could see you there.”
He laughed at that.
“I’m going to take that as a compliment,” he said. She’d meant it as one, but he didn’t give her a chance to say so. “But while I loved the dancing, it very much felt like a career for three years, five, max. Like a football player, except with less money and fewer concussions. And I didn’t love it enough to be an instructor and give it my whole life. A lot of the guys went on to try acting, but I wasn’t interested—what, I’d
wait tables for years and maybe get one or two lines on some show eventually? I knew it wasn’t my calling, and neither was doing camerawork, as fun as it is.”
“How did you figure out that advertising was for you?”
He groaned.
“I’m so sorry I have to admit this, but it was my brother. I came home for Christmas, that last year in L.A., when I’d quit dancing and was still doing crew stuff but was sort of . . . aimless. And he tricked me into going out for drinks with him and said he’d pay, and I was too young and broke to realize there must be an ulterior motive. And then he asked me all of those fucking questions about where I saw myself in the future and what I love and what I wanted to be doing with my life and blah blah. I was so mad at him.” He shook his head. “I kept thinking about what he’d asked me, even though I didn’t want to. And I realized the thing that fascinates me the most is drawing people in, figuring out how they tick, turning something into nothing. So eventually I asked Theo if he knew anyone who did that kind of work. I didn’t even realize what it was, at that point. He said it sounded a lot like what people do in advertising and marketing to him. And some friend of a friend of his who worked at an ad agency talked to me on the phone for like an hour, and everything they said sounded right up my alley. So I moved home—and back in with my mom, who was not thrilled about that—and went to school up here. I sort of assumed I’d move back to L.A. at some point, but I’ve liked my jobs in San Francisco, so I never left.”
She liked the fond, exasperated way he talked about his brother.
“Plus, your family is all in the Bay Area, right?” she said.
He nodded.
“Not all, but mostly. I have some family and lots of good friends down South, of course. But . . .” He shrugged. “The Bay Area is still home. Despite . . . all of the changes over the past decade or so, it still feels that way.”
That sounded familiar.
“Yes, definitely,” she said. “I do love L.A. now, even though it can be . . .” She bit her lip and tried to think of the right word. “Overwhelming sometimes. But when I come up here—or, I guess, up there, since we’re pretty far south now—it feels right.” She laughed. “Sometimes I make excuses to go up there. Like this ad campaign.”
He flashed her a smile.
“Well, I, for one, am glad you made excuses this time.”
She felt an enormous desire to give him a hug. The only thing that stopped her was the impossibility of hugging someone who was currently driving a car down Interstate 5.
“Me, too,” she said instead.
Six
A few hours later, they pulled into the hospital parking lot. It was a ghost town at this hour, with only a handful of other cars. They’d spent the end of the drive playing all the road games they could figure out how to play at night—license plate bingo didn’t work so well, but then it was rare to see anything but California or Nevada plates in this area anyway. They’d also played progressively louder music, and told fake stories about the people in the cars around them. Anna told herself she was doing all of this to keep Ben awake and entertained in the wee hours of the morning, but really, it was to keep herself busy, so she wouldn’t anticipate what was at the end of the drive.
Now they were finally here, and Anna was terrified about what she’d find inside that hospital.
Ben looked at her after he turned off the car.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded at him, and then shook her head.
“I’m not okay.” She’d tried to practice saying that over the last year, but it was still hard. She made herself smile. “But we came all this way, can’t miss the main event!” She tried to make a joke out of it, and very much appreciated that Ben gave her a pity smile.
“If you need a minute, it’s fine,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”
She unbuckled her seat belt. She’d dreaded arriving, but now that they were here, she had to get inside.
“No, I need to see them,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Ben reached for his seat belt but didn’t release it.
“I don’t have to come in,” he said. “It’s totally okay, my feelings won’t be hurt, I can just sit here and catch up on my—”
She shook her head progressively harder as he talked.
“No, please come with me.” Wait, did that sound too needy? “You don’t have to if you don’t want to, but I’d hate to have you come all this way and then just wait in the car.”
He unsnapped his seat belt and opened his car door.
“Okay, then. Let’s go.”
As they walked out of the tiny parking lot and toward the hospital doors, Anna fought back the impulse to reach for Ben’s hand. That was ridiculous, she barely even knew him, why was she relying on him so much? No, she was a grown-up; she could handle this. She could handle it even if . . . No, no, she wasn’t going to think about that right now.
She especially wasn’t going to think about those hours that she’d sat in the hospital waiting room while her father had been in surgery, waiting and waiting to hear if he’d survived it. And she definitely wasn’t going to think about that day last year when her dad had appeared at her front door, let himself in with the key she’d given her parents when she’d bought her house, pulled her into his arms, and let her cry for an hour. And then managed to get her on the road to pulling her life back together. No, she couldn’t think about that, either, or she’d cry. And she couldn’t cry now, she had to hold it together, for everyone in the hospital, for Ben, for her mom.
She let out a deep breath, and Ben looked over at her. Oh God, please let him not ask her if she was okay, because she wasn’t sure she could pretend to be okay, but if she told him she wasn’t okay, she knew she would fall apart, and she couldn’t, couldn’t fall apart.
“Glad we made it here,” he said. “If I say so myself, driving was a brilliant idea.”
She appreciated his effort to make her laugh, even if she couldn’t quite do it.
“It absolutely was,” she said.
Their knuckles brushed together as they walked through the automatic doors of the hospital.
“Hi, I’m looking for my dad,” Anna said to the bored-looking woman at the information desk. “Phillip Rose?” The woman barely looked at her and turned to a computer.
“Rose, like the flower rose?” she asked in a monotone.
“Um, yes,” Anna said. “Like the flower.” How hard was it to spell “Rose,” anyway? Were there that many variations?
She waited as the woman typed into the computer. And waited some more. How many Roses could there be in this small hospital? How many people could there even be? Why was this taking so long? Anna kept a pleasant look on her face, even though she could feel her heart beating, faster and faster. She felt her breathing getting shallow, so she tried to do the deep-breathing technique she’d learned, but it felt like there was something sitting on her chest.
Ben put a light hand on her back. She leaned into the gentle pressure, and he kept his hand there. She could breathe a little better.
Suddenly, the woman shook her head.
“No Rose here.”
No. That couldn’t be possible. She knew this was the right hospital. Maybe they’d had to move him to a different hospital?
“He came in through the emergency room. Earlier today. Or I guess it was yesterday now, but he—”
A deep laugh stopped her. She looked up, and there, coming down the hallway toward her, were her parents. Laughing and chatting with each other like they were strolling down the street on the way to a restaurant on a Saturday night, not like they were walking through a hospital on the way out of the emergency room.
“Dad? Mom?”
They both looked at her, and her father’s face broke out into a grin.
“Anna, baby, what are you doing here?”
&nb
sp; Before he’d finished talking, she’d made it to him and pulled him into a hug.
“Dad! You’re okay! I was so worried.” Don’t cry don’t cry she couldn’t let herself cry.
“I told Christopher not to tell you we were here. I knew you would do something like fly down here,” her mother said.
She hugged her mom, too.
“Shouldn’t you know by now that Chris and I tell each other all of the important things? Wouldn’t it be easier for you to just tell us all of the important things, too? Tell me now, what happened?” She turned to her dad. “Are you okay? Really?”
He patted her on the shoulder.
“Really, Anna. I’m okay, I promise. Just a little spot of heat exhaustion—I foolishly hadn’t been drinking enough water out in the desert, and then I stopped to help someone change a tire, and well, the next thing I knew I was here. But don’t worry. They checked me all out and gave me an IV full of liquids and I’m as good as new.”
Anna looked at her mom.
“Is that true?”
Her mom pursed her lips, but nodded.
“Yes, Anna, it’s true, we swear. You’re such a suspicious child, you always have been. This is like when you found out about Santa Claus and grilled us about everything else. But we told the truth then, didn’t we?”
Anna smiled at the memory. She’d been seven. Her mom had sworn her to secrecy, she’d said her brother still believed, and she didn’t want Anna to ruin it for him, or for any of the other kids in her school. That had been one of the only secrets Anna had ever kept from her brother.
But her parents did have a habit of keeping important things from her. To “protect” her, or so she “wouldn’t worry,” et cetera, et cetera. She might be a thirty-two-year-old woman with a successful career who owned a house and had been on the cover of many magazines, but her parents still thought she was a child. Her mom looked like she was telling the truth right now, though.
“I remember,” she said to her mom. “You’ll call the doctor at home, right? And make sure he gets checked out then?”
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