Trashed

by Alison Gaylin

  “Before you make that call, I want you to think about where that approach has gotten you so far.”

  Simone said, “I can tell where this is going, but—”

  “I also want you to think about that assistant. How will she feel if she gets a call from Emerald’s father— ‘How dare you give an Asteroid reporter my number?’ Imagine, she’s lost a dear friend, she’s out of a job, and she gets a call like that, from her dead boss’s father?”

  Simone frowned. “I’ll tell him I got his number somewhere else.”

  “Okay.”

  Simone started to pick up the phone again; Kathy stuck her hand over the dial pad. “Cut it out,” Simone said.

  “Bear with me a second,” Kathy replied. “I just want you to think about Emerald’s poor, poor dad. He lost his son Oz, and now his only daughter, his only child, has cut her own throat? Don’t you think . . . what’s Daddy’s name?”

  She sighed. “Wayne.”

  “Don’t you think Wayne would rather hear from a friend of Emerald’s? Maybe someone from her Kabbalah study group, or a PETA pal? You know, someone who could help put her life in perspective? Don’t you think Wayne deserves that, rather than some tabloid reporter calling him up to ask questions?”

  “Kathy,” said Simone, “he deserves the truth.”

  “The truth is overrated. He deserves kindness.” She gave Simone a long, meaningful look. “And you, honey, you deserve details.”

  Kathy’s blue eyes sparkled like a sunlit ocean, and for what was easily the tenth or twentieth time since they’d met, Simone thought, God, she is good.

  Kathy moved her hand away from the dial pad. “Do the right thing.”

  “I’m trying.” Slowly, Simone tapped Wayne Deegan’s number into the phone. After one ring, she heard a man’s voice that was so weak, it was as if someone had taken a vacuum cleaner to it, sucked out all its life. “Hello?”

  “Mr. Deegan?”

  “Yes.”

  “I . . .” Simone’s throat clenched up. She swallowed. “I just wanted to tell you I’m so, so sorry for your loss. I can’t even imagine how you must feel right now.”

  He said, “Who is this, please?”

  Emerald’s voice floated through her mind. My dad believed in magic. He still does.

  “Hello?”

  “I’m . . . I was . . . I’m Tina. Emerald’s Pilates partner.”

  Kathy gave her a thumbs-up sign.

  “I was . . . I’m wondering if I might be able to drop by. I have some flowers, and—”

  Deegan said, “I’m allergic to flowers.”

  “Okay. Listen, I’m sorry to have bothered you.” Simone shot Kathy an angry look.

  Kathy shrugged her shoulders, mouthed the words “Oh well.”

  That’s the last time I listen to her. Simone figured Deegan must have hung up the phone, and she was about to do the same, until she heard the man’s voice again, the faintest hint of life in it. “You know what, Tina? I could use the company.”

  It wasn’t until she was driving to Wayne Deegan’s house in Arcadia that Simone’s conscience woke up and started tearing at her. Before that, she’d been on a bit of a high. When she told Nigel that Emerald Deegan’s father had invited her to his home, he’d looked her in the eye and said, “Well done.” He’d even called New York and told Willard about it, mentioning Simone by name.

  “Heartwarming, eye-popping, gut-wrenching,” said Nigel as she walked out the door. “Get it fast. And don’t hit traffic. We’re closing the story in six hours.”

  Simone had sprinted out to her Jeep and taken off, car radio blasting, heart banging against her ribs, the words “heartwarming, eye-popping, gut-wrenching” running through her head like song lyrics. Not once did she feel guilty for telling this man—this man whose only daughter had bled to death that morning—that she was Emerald’s Pilates partner. Not until now.

  She opened her window and let the dirty air burrow into the side of her face. The Santa Anas had died down, but it was still hot beyond belief, and the heat seemed accusatory—it made her think of hot seats, of white-hot lamps from movie interrogation scenes.

  On the car radio, Meat Loaf was wailing about how he’d do anything for love, but he wouldn’t do that, and Simone wondered, what was her that when it came to this job? Did she even have a that anymore—or had two days at the Asteroid rendered her thatless?

  She had lied to a grieving parent.

  She glanced into the rearview mirror at the black Saab behind her, peered into the window of the yellow Beetle one lane over, the college girl behind the wheel smearing gloss on her lips. She gazed ahead, at the dirty pickup truck piled with rusted car parts, and in the lane to her right, at the elderly couple riding silently in some kind of Buick, staring straight ahead as if each of them were alone. Who knew what secrets any of these people had? Who knew what lies they were living with, what truths had hurt them beyond repair? Who knew what they were thinking, what played on their consciences, if they had ever betrayed or hurt or even killed. . . .

  Simone shook her head. Jobs weren’t supposed to pose existential dilemmas, but this one did. She’d received high honors in journalistic ethics and now . . . now she was an insider.

  She saw the Santa Anita Avenue off-ramp and pulled off the freeway. Wayne Deegan’s house was less than five minutes away and she couldn’t afford to think about this, not now, when she had to bring back a story that would close in six hours. The story of a frail beauty whose dad no longer believed in magic. The story of a promising young TV star who had slashed her own throat . . . or . . .

  I still wish I had a big sister.

  Why?

  Protection.

  Or had been murdered. Did Emerald’s father think she’d done that to herself? Or did he have doubts, like Holly?

  A few blocks south of Wayne Deegan’s street, Simone glanced into her rearview mirror and saw a black Saab.

  It was the same Saab from the freeway—about ten years old, dusty, with tinted glass so you couldn’t see the driver. We’re just going in the same direction, Simone thought. But then she replayed the drive in her mind and realized that every time she’d looked in the rearview, the Saab had been there. A car length or two between them, yes, but the entire drive, in the same lane. . . .

  Simone sped up so quickly her tires squealed. Just before she reached the stoplight on Santa Anita and Foothill, she put her right blinker on, shifted suddenly into the left lane and started moving into oncoming traffic, horns screaming at her. The black car clung to the space behind her. She felt like something out of an old Bruce Willis movie—this being the part where the Eurotrash with the ponytail leans out the side of the Saab and starts firing the submachine gun.

  Her pulse raced; her head brimmed with questions as she powered west on Foothill, away from Wayne Deegan’s house. Panicked as she was, she was also horribly confused—which was almost worse.

  Who was following her? Why would anyone want to?

  When she reached a space between the dividers on Foothill, Simone hung a quick left, tearing up some residential street whose name she didn’t bother to check. After a few blocks on the new street, she forced herself to look into the rearview mirror again. No Saab—at least not where she could see it.

  Simone made a U-turn and headed East on Foothill, retracing her steps, moving back toward Wayne Deegan’s house. No Saab on the other side of Foothill. No Saab in the rearview. The black car was nowhere.

  Okay . . . Maybe she’d managed to scare it off. Or maybe it had never been following her to begin with.

  She took a deep breath, tried to focus on getting to Wayne Deegan’s house. That was the important thing—not some disappearing 1995 compact. She glanced at the directions Deegan had given her. Left on Santa Anita, four blocks up, another left on Woodland. The house is white brick. . . .

  On the radio, Simone heard a commercial for a new movie, Devil’s Road, starring Chris Hart, whom she used to have a crush on back in high school. �
��Chris Hart as you’ve never seen him,” said the solemn male voice-over, “and introducing . . . Dylan Leeds.”

  Dylan Leeds was apparently a woman—a woman with a thick California accent that, to Simone, sounded oddly familiar. “Please dewnt be thaht way, Dahniel . . . ,” she said, her voice choked with emotion. Who talks like that? Someone I know, or knew. . . . Simone wracked her brain for a few moments and drew a blank.

  It was the film’s title that stayed with her, though. It felt prophetic. “Don’t go down that road,” intoned the voice-over, just as Simone made a left on Woodland—Wayne Deegan’s road.

  Simone drove slowly down the quiet, residential street, both eyes peeled for white brick. Like most nice neighborhoods in Southern California, everything here had a spit-shined look to it: not just the cars, but the green lawns and deep black driveways, the pink and red camellia bushes with their glossy leaves. All of it so perfect, so clean—as if the residents were trying to compensate for the air quality—or for something else.

  Wayne Deegan’s house was huge, a white-brick mini-mansion wedged into a lot better suited for a ranch house. Simone found it startling. Over the phone, he hadn’t sounded like a mini-mansion kind of guy.

  Even the doorbell was louder than she’d expected it to be, a sterile, electronic bing. She thought maybe a maid would answer the door, but then she heard a man’s voice—the same defeated voice from the phone.

  “Is that you, Tina?”

  She inhaled sharply. “Yes, Mr. Deegan.”

  “Okay, just a minute.”

  Deegan cracked open the door, and she saw them, Emerald’s geode eyes, set in the large, florid face of a man in his late fifties. It choked her up so much she had to stare at her shoes. Why was it genetics could be so moving?

  “So you were friends with my little girl?”

  “Yes,” said Simone. “She was . . . just . . . wonderful.”

  He opened the door wider, revealing the whole of his big frame—the opposite of his daughter’s, yet somehow just as frail. His thin gray hair stood half on end, and he wore frayed, navy blue sweatpants, a matching sweatshirt with the Dodgers logo across the front. He smelled faintly of ketchup.

  In the geode eyes, she saw not tears but the threat of them, a kind of cloudiness. Her own father’s eyes had looked the same when he told Simone and Greta about the death of their grandmother—his mother. It killed Simone that there were still men like this around—men with cloudy eyes who wanted to protect you from their emotions.

  “The place is a mess,” Deegan said. “Hope you don’t mind.” And Simone knew this whole Pilates partner thing was not going to work.

  Wayne Deegan stopped reminding Simone of her father the minute she stepped into his house. When he’d mentioned the mess, she’d anticipated a little disorder—but not this. She tried to keep her expression neutral, like this was nothing unusual. Just a middle-aged gentleman, living alone. . . .

  It was like a cityscape of old newspapers—rows and rows of them stacked up, yellowing and torn, intermingled with magazines, advertising supplements, and telephone books, some of the stacks as tall as Simone, some just one Wall Street Journal away from toppling and causing a hideous domino effect. Deegan was a big man, but in Simone’s opinion it would be entirely possible for him to fall victim to his own compulsion, suffocated by newsprint, unable to free himself.

  Simone tried to keep her tone neutral. “Did Emerald ever visit you here?”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “Every Sunday.”

  “Really?!”

  “I’d make her coffee, we’d catch up, listen to jazz records. I’m a collector.”

  That is certainly true. She tried to picture Emerald roaming through all this detritus in high heels, bracelets jangling. Several paths wound through the stacks of papers, and Deegan took one of the wider ones, his sneakers crunching on errant pages that had drifted to the dusty wooden floors. Simone followed, glancing at a page as she stepped on it—LA Times. January 1, 2000.

  “Can I get you a cup of coffee, Tina?”

  “No, thanks.” She followed Deegan into a den, where more newspaper piles loomed over the furniture like disapproving parents. Simone’s brain shouted, Tell him who you really are! It was bad enough to lie to a grieving father, but to lie to one with an obvious mental illness . . .

  Deegan sat down on the couch, which was large and elegant, covered in thick jade silk. It didn’t look like something he’d pick out for himself, and Simone wondered if it was a gift from Emerald. She sat down beside him, her gaze shooting to the coffee table, to stacks of Time, Newsweek, People . . . not a tabloid in sight.

  “You know,” Deegan said, “Emerald never mentioned taking a Pilates class.”

  “Mr. Deegan, I’m so sorry.”

  He nodded “Thank you.”

  “No, I mean . . .” Simone looked into those cloudy eyes again. There is no easy way to say it, so stop trying to find one. “I’m not really Emerald’s Pilates partner.”

  He gazed at her. “You’re not?”

  “No. . . .” She took a deep breath, in and out. “I’m a reporter for the Asteroid. I lied to get you to talk to me.”

  Deegan was silent, and so was Simone, and for a while they both sat there, her words hanging in the still air like subtitles.

  Simone took a breath. “I met Emerald one time, on the Suburban Indiscretions set. I probably spent a total of fifteen minutes with her, but even then, she mentioned you. She said you believed in magic, and I could tell she loved you very much.”

  She ventured a glance at Deegan, who was closing his eyes tight, pinching the bridge of his nose to stem the flow of tears. “I guess I’d better leave now,” she said.

  Deegan opened his eyes. “Don’t go.”

  Simone looked at him.

  “Hey, you came all this way, I should at least talk to you.”

  “Really?”

  “Why not?” he said. “You’re a hell of a lot nicer than the Times reporter who called. And like I said before, I could use the company.”

  By the time they’d been talking for twenty minutes, Simone’s microcassette recorder placed on the coffee table atop a 1999 People, she had forgotten about the smell of dust and newsprint, the leaning, moldering piles of periodicals, and even the fire threat they posed.

  Because, aside from all that, Wayne Deegan was a remarkably normal and humble man—especially for this town. A former sound engineer for a small record company who had lost his wife to cancer, he had tried his best to raise his daughter alone. He told Simone, “It was hard. There were a lot of things, I think, Emerald couldn’t talk to me about.”

  “Like?”

  “Boys, makeup, clothes. . . . Emerald’s mom died when she was just three, and I never had too many female friends—or friends in general, so . . . she kind of had to figure out that stuff on her own.”

  Simone leaned forward. “What about Emerald’s brother? Were they close?”

  He gave her a blank look. “Brother?”

  “Yes,” said Simone. “When I met her on set, she mentioned a brother named Oz?”

  Deegan stared at her, the color draining from his face.

  She cleared her throat. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “She knew his name.”

  Simone said, “What do you mean?”

  “Oz was Emerald’s twin.”

  “But why wouldn’t—”

  “He was stillborn.”

  Simone’s gaze went straight to the floor. “Oh.”

  When Deegan spoke again, his voice was slight and faraway, like someone hypnotized, recalling a troubling dream. “I don’t know how she learned his name,” he said. “She . . . Emerald was a very sensitive person. Too sensitive. ”

  “How do you mean?”

  “If Oz was a girl, we would have named her Glinda, but I never told Emerald either of those names. She went through a phase, she was about six. . . . She kept telling me she ate too much of Mommy’s food when she was in her tummy. Said
she starved her brother to death and Mommy too. I kept trying to tell her that wasn’t true at all, that she was the light of my life and . . .” He ran the back of his hand over his eyes, swallowed hard.

  “It’s okay,” said Simone “It’s . . .”

  “She stopped eating. Didn’t eat anything I made her, and I tried everything. I figured she was just picky. Lots of kids are, and she said she was eating her school lunches, but . . . she got real pale and skinny and . . . one day I got a call from the school nurse. She had fainted in class.”

  “You must have been so scared.”

  He nodded. “I rushed her to the hospital. They said she was dehydrated. They hooked her up to IVs, and when she got some strength back I took her in to see a shrink that specialized in anorexia. Anorexia at six . . .” Deegan looked at Simone. “But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t about how she looked. It was because she felt bad for being alive.”

  Simone recalled Emerald’s thin, thin body, heard her say, Nerves.

  Deegan ran a hand through his fine, dull hair. “You understand what I’m saying?” he said. “When you tell me she mentioned Oz to you, and then . . . then this morning she . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Simone said, “Did Emerald seem unusually upset recently? ”

  “No,” said Deegan. “But the thing is, she never acted upset around me. She was always my cheerful girl, never told me anything bad. I’ve read stuff in the papers—your paper, too—about her boyfriend, Keith . . . running around with other women, not treating Emerald the way she deserved. She said, ‘Don’t believe what you read, Daddy. Keith and I are great.’ ” He swiped his face with the sleeve of his sweatshirt and said, “I don’t know how to do this.”

  “It’s okay, Mr. Deegan. We can end it now if you like.”

  “I don’t mean the interview,” he said. “I don’t know how to . . . I don’t know how to live without my little girl. This isn’t the way it’s supposed to go. This shouldn’t be something I have to learn.”

  Simone just looked at him. What could she say to that? He was right.

  Wayne Deegan sent Simone off with a microcassette full of details Nigel was bound to love, plus a stack of personal photos—Emerald dressed as a ballerina for Halloween, Emerald as a tomboyish preteen in soccer clothes, Emerald glamorous in her prom dress with her very tall date, both of them smiling nervously for her father’s camera.